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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER 



AND 



OTHER SERMONS 



J. RANKIN 




BOSTON 
D. LOTHROP & CO., FRANKLIN ST 
NEW YORK 
H. E. SIMMONS, 150 NASSAU ST. 




Copyright, i?86 
by 

D. Lothrop & Company. 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 029066 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

PAGK 

Christ His Own Interpreter ... i 

Holding Fast the Form of Sound Words. 21 

The Race Solvent 39 

Life Eternal 59 

The Sense of Property in Sin . , , 77 



I. 



CHRIST HIS O WN INTERPRE TER. 



John X : 1 1 — " I am the good Shepherd : the good Shepherd 
giveth his life for the sheep." 

If there ever was a Being, wearing the human form 
and living among men, who knew Himself and why He 
came here it was the Man Christ Jesus. He always 
walked in the shadow of the Cross : He never forgot that 
He came here to do the Father's will. Self-knowledge 
is the most difficult knowledge which men ever attain. 
There is nosphynxin Egypt like the sphynx in a man's 
bosom. Men think too much or too little of them- 
selves. They pride themselves on being what they are 
not : on having a sphere which is not theirs. They 
undertake to do what they can not do : they leave undone 
what they might do. Ail from want of self-knowledge. 

How many a man dies, feeling that his life has been a 
failure ; that he has not taken it by the right handle ; 
that somehow he has missed the tide that, taken at its 
flood, would have borne him on to fortune ; and there- 
fore his shallows and his miseries. For one man. who 
knows why he is here, and what God has for him to do ; 



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CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



who adjusts himself to his surroundings ; who fits into 
things as a horse into his harness, and works there, and 
who feels that whatever work other men have, this is his 
work from God, this is why God sent him into the 
world; there are hundreds of men to whom life is a 
joke, of which they seem to be the butt ; is a conundrum 
which they are trying to guess ; a problem which they 
are trying to solve ; a mystery which they are trying to 
penetrate. 

You and I, as we look back four hundred years, and 
see Martin Luther, that moral Hercules, trying to let in 
the River of Life upon those Augean stables at Rome, 
where had gathered the moral filth of centuries; nailing 
the truth to the church door at Wittenberg ; burning the 
Pope's bull publicly before the city's gates; putting the 
Word of God into the German vernacular, so that David 
and Isaiah, John and Paul could, in his terse phrase, speak 
Dutch ; you and I know why Martin Luther was born, 
and for what cause he came into the world. In a good 
measure he knew it himself; but not as we do; not as 
God did. For, in some sense, the vantage-ground 
which history gives us, if we find God in it, is like the 
vantage-ground which He has, to whom time is one 
eternal now ; who knows the end from the beginning ; 
who sees the plant in the seed ; the oak in the acorn ; 
the man in the boy ; His ministers that do His pleasure 
in men whose breath is in their nostrils. God only can 
interpret a man to himself ; can interpret a man to his 
fellows. 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



3 



The subject which I want to discuss this morning is 
this : 

CHRIST, HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 

"I am the good Shepherd ; the good Shepherd giveth 
His life for the sheep." 

I. The interpretations which have been put upon 
Christ's person and work are very various. These have 
been largely determined by the standpoint from which 
men have looked at Him. What is the testimony of 
His contemporaries ? Men who knew Him in His life ; 
men who companied with Him, who heard His words 
and saw His works ; men who were born of His Spirit 
immediately after His death ; nay for three centuries 
after His death; put their interpretation into one single 
word : worship ! They never doubted that He was God ! 
Three centuries of worship ! This is the first step in 
the Christology of the Church. Then and not till then 
Arianism. They had an experience of His power to for- 
give sin ; of His power to transform their fallen nature, 
such that they could say nothing less than those words 
of Peter : " Thou art the Son of the living God those 
words of Thomas: " My Lord and my God!" There 
was such an inscrutable mystery about Him ; He had 
such sovereignty relating to the powers of nature ; to dis- 
ease, as its healer ; to sorrow and to sin, as a fellow- 
sufferer ; to the elements, as their master and Lord ; 
even to death itself, that they could put no other inter- 
pretation upon Him. What manner of Man is this ! 
They knew He was more than man ! 



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CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



We are nearly nineteen centuries from the commence- 
ment of the Christian era. . In that period Christian ex- 
perience has not changed its nature. That which con- 
vinced the woman of Samaria ; that which convinced 
Andrew and Peter ; that which convinced John and Paul 
of the divinity of Christ; that He came here to be a 
propitiation for the sins of the world ; that which in- 
duced them to repent and believe in Him has not changed. 
There are no new tests to be applied to these things. It is 
interesting for the student of ecclesiastical history to read 
about Arianism, the theory that Christ was superhuman 
without being divine ; about Patripassianism, the theory 
that He was the one God dwelling in a human body ; 
the Father, before the incarnation, the Son, afterward ; 
about Nestorianism, the theory which gives us in Him 
both man and God, distinct from each other, but no 
God-Man. But it is a great deal more interesting to me 
to know that for three centuries, the Christian Church, 
without undertaking to define just what she believed as 
to the mode of His being, accepted this Jesus of Naza- 
reth as a Being to be worshipped. 

What we want in history is to know just how a histor- 
cal character impressed Himself upon His contemporaries. 
We want to put ourselves in their place and see out of 
their eyes. We want the power, not to reconstruct Him 
out of the materials in our hands, real or imaginary ; not 
to argue that He must have been this or that to make out 
our hypothesis ; but to reproduce Him from the impres- 
sions He made \ from the estimates made of Him by His 
contemporaries ; to set Him again amid the surroundings 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



5 



of His time, and find out what men thought of Him then. 
That is the Man we want to know. For three centuries 
Christ was worshipped. This is just contrary to the my- 
thical theory of accounting for what was wonderful in His 
career ; as if things, not in themselves supernatural, should 
in the course of centuries come to be so regarded; as moss 
gathers on stones. 

The Christian era opens. The world begins to count 
its age anew. Some Being has lived and flied, who, for 
three hundred years, by them who knew Him best and 
loved Him most, is worshipped as God. There is no 
mythical character of divinity that can gather upon such 
a character as this. All the literature about Christ that 
has ever been produced ; and the last generation has been 
the most prolific of all ; cannot help us to the understand- 
ing of such a character, as do the simple annals of the 
Gospel. 

What is the testimony of prophecy ? It is a wonderful 
fact that to-day, when the angry seas of all kinds of crit- 
icism are dashing against the Word of God, there is noth- 
ing that so keeps it from going to pieces as the Man 
Christ Jesus. He is its Alpha and Omega. It is as 
though the roots of the Tree of Life had so gone into the 
soil of the Bible that they hold this soil together. If 
you say, that previous to the history of Joseph the sacred 
narrative is rather a compilation of traditions than any 
connected history, as is the language of what is called the 
higher criticism of to-day, I point you to these words 
in the third chapter of Genesis : "It shall bruise thy head, 
and thou shall bruise his heel." Here is a line of pro- 



6 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



phetic light that must have been written by the finger of 
God. Here is the beginning of all prophecy relative to 
the Son of Man ; the first hint of Bethlehem and Calvary. 
Here is something that differentiates the narrative of the 
first things in Genesis, from the traditions of other na- 
tions which seem to be parallel with it. It has the Man 
Christ Jesus in it ; it has in it the purpose of God to be- 
come incarnate. And from this beginning, there, among 
those dim Eden highlands, this stream of prophecy flows 
through the whole book until it is lost in that great sea 
of life, in The Revelation. This is the seed of Abra- 
ham, in whom all the nations of the earth shall be blessed; 
the seed of David, of whom the Lord swore in truth, 
" Of the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy throne;" 
the One of whom Isaiah speaks, " Behold a virgin shall 
conceive and bear a Son, and thou shalt call His name 
Immanuel and Daniel, where he says, " And after three 
score and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for 
Himself." 

There are two things respecting the Old Testament 
which never can be overthrown : The fact that its bur- 
den of history, type, prophecy, is the Man Christ Jesus, 
and the other fact that to its genuineness and authority 
as well as to the character of its contents, He Himself 
has given this testimony : " Search the Scriptures, for in 
them ye think ye have eternal life ; and they are they 
which testify of me." These are Christ's witnesses, to 
which He appealed on that wonderful walk to Emrnaus. 
And beginning at Moses and all the prophets He ex- 
pounded unto them in all the Scriptures the thing concern- 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



7 



ing Himself. He found things concerning Himself in 
Moses, in David, in Isaiah, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel, in 
Daniel, in Micah, in Zechariah, in Malachi. And these 
things are there to-day with His divine indorsement. 
And these things are what hold the Bible together. For 
He believed them to relate to Himself. And the book, 
which for centuries before His advent contained them, 
must be a book from God. 

II. The interpretation put upon Christ is said to be 
•different, in different sacred writers, according to their 
temperament and mental structure. 

There is a great deal said about the Pauline theology 
.as something distinct from that of John, from that of 
Christ, Paul's Master and Lord. There are those who 
do not regard John or the Saviour as ever teaching the 
•doctrine of a vicarious .atonement ; of ever conceiving 
that it was Christ's commission from the Father to make, 
nay to become a propitiation for the sins of the whole 
world. They say the Apostle Paul foisted this dogma 
into Christian theology. It is true, that the Christology 
of the Gospels, of the Evangelists, is like the science of 
material things in nature. It is not systematized. The 
'Gospels are only Memorabilia ; like Xenophon's Memo- 
rabilia of Socrates. Facts are given without classifica- 
tion. For, both in things material and things spiritual, 
facts are the things with which men have the most to do. 
Christology is only the science of Christ's nature and 
work as gathered from the facts recorded in His life. 
The function of the Apostle Paul, more especially in the 
Epistle to the Romans, was like that of Linnaeus in 



8 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



Botany: to take these facts and derive from them a prin- 
ciple, a law, a doctrine ; to arrange them in their proper 
order ; to articulate the body of Christian doctrine, 
gathering up and bringing together different members 
scattered through Christ's own life, teachings and work. 

I claim not only that there is no antagonism between 
the theology of St. John and that of St. Paul, but that 
St. Paul is the best exponent of St. John's theology, better 
even than St. John himself. You cannot find a statement 
of St. John's theology better than this: " I am crucified 
with Christ; nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ 
liveth in me. ' ' There is an experimental theology, a 
mystical theology ; a theology derived from the. side of 
the spirit, from the side of experience, which is just as 
genuine as the theology of the intellect, but no more so. 
The disciple that leaned in the Master's bosom and was 
privileged to ask Him hard questions, affected this 
theology. His nature was gentle, his conceptions of 
the truth spiritual and experimental, rather than intel- 
lectual and logical. We are told in these days that "the 
doctrines that men regarded as parts of orthodoxy are 
the reflections of the social condition in which they 
were formulated, ' ' the voice of the new theology ; that 
St. Paul so conceived of, the economy of grace because of 
the peculiarities of Roman society and Roman authority ; 
and that now, since Rome is no more, and Roman hea- 
thenism is no more, the power of the Gospel has changed 
all this, and so good-bye to the old ideas of God's sov- 
ereignty, man's depravity. This is the attitude of what 
is called the new theology, the new movement. This 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



9 



statement implies a very loose conception of what inspi- 
ration is in the way of guarding the sacred writers from 
mistaking what in Christianity is permanent from what 
is temporary. The Pauline aspects of truth then are 
not in the nature of things, but were in the political 
economy of ancient Rome, and so the apostle, who was 
writing only for a single generation and not for all time, 
is left to foist materials into his Epistles which might 
help the Christians at Rome, but which are a hindrance 
to Christians in America, who are now trying to work 
themselves free of them under the leadership of these 
new theologians, these modern mystics, who are navi- 
gating new seas, expecting new continents. 

I have no doubt of the debt which humanity owes to 
the jurisprudence of the Romans. It is the best formula- 
tion of the reign of law in civil affairs up to that time ever 
made. It has doubtless had its bearing upon every- 
thing governmental that has come after it. We are 
debtors to it every day we live. But the idea of law 
was just as really in Nature, in Judaism, as in Roman 
jurisprudence ; and what need to look to imperial Rome 
to discover the idea of God's sovereignty ? And where 
in imperial Rome was the idea of vicarious atonement as 
the Jews had it ? The Mosaic system had these things 
as ancient Rome never had them. This, humanly 
speaking, is what Mosaism was for. And if it is true, 
as Jesus says it is, that He came not to destroy the law 
and the prophets, but to fulfill them, where but in Juda- 
ism are we to look for the pre-intimations of His king- 
dom ? Judaism, like Paganism in Rome, passes away- 



TO 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



But, what in Judaism was typical and symbolical of the 
Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, abideth forever. 
Read the Epistle to the Hebrews, and see how the Old 
Dispensation unfolds into the New, as a bud unfolds into 
the flower. 

That man has read the theology of St. Paul in vain, 
who finds in it only a system of dry bones, like the bones 
of a skeleton ; a system of salvation by substitution ; 
legal and judicial. I want to quote here from a Unita- 
rian, who will not be partial on this question. I refer 
to Athanase Coquerel, the younger, in his " First Histori- 
cal Transformations of Christianity." This is what he 
says : "The whole theology of Paul rests not only upon 
the antagonism of Christianity, which he calls faith, 
with Mosaism, which he calls law ; but upon the more 
radical opposition of the Jewish principle to the Chris- 
tian principle ; of exterior and formalistic legality to the 
interior life of the spirit. All ceremonial religions, all 
external rules, all rituals, all codes, are powerless to 
sanctify, because they bear upon the outer life of the 
human being. It is by the spirit alone, by the heart, 
the conscience, the real feelings, the inner life, that man 
"becomes holy and just, because it is by these alone that 
man subjects to the influence of truth and love the rest 
of all his faculties ; the source whence all his actions 
spring. Faith, according to Paul, does not reduce itself 
merely to the fact that one does not doubt such or 
such a doctrine ; it is the adhesion of the entire soul, 
convinced, penetrated, regenerated, embracing with all 
its strength, truth, Christ, God. If Paul be inquired of, 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



how Jesus saves souls, there are two responses, which he 
gives by turn. In truth, he entertained two theories of 
salvation, one mystic and emotional, the other dogmatic 
and argumentative. He often gives one alone of these 
as sufficient ; and two inverse series of passages might be 
arranged, wherein each would seem to be ail, while the 
other is passed over in silence. The mystical theory is 
that of the union of the believer with Him in whom he 
believes. Christ is wholly united to God, and he who be- 
lieves in God through Christ is united closely to Christ, 
and through Christ to God. This idea, which is found 
again in St. John, and which emanates directly from 
Christ Himself, is carried very far by our apostle. The 
Christian is to live the life of His Master ; to die and 
rise again ; that is, associate Himself with the crises 
which He has passed through, and come forth from them 
triumphant. ' ' 

The mystical theory is something which is not ad- 
dressed to the head ; it cannot be proved by argument. 
It is intuitional. It proves itself as a flash of light 
beaming upon the darkness. Hear one of its affirma- 
tions : " We know that we have passed from death unto 
life ! ' ' Wonderful transition ! How do we know ? Be- 
cause we are justified by faith ? This is not the method 
under consideration. "We know that we have passed 
from death unto life, because we love the brethren ! " It 
is a shorter cut than that though didactic theology. But 
the conclusion is the same. ' ' Ye have an unction from 
the Holy One, and ye know all things. ' ' This mystical 
theology is that which protects the great body of 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



Christians from the attacks made upon their faith. But 7 
after all, the standards of faith are to be formulated 
only by the head. It will not do to underrate the other 
theology of St. Paul. Theology, as a science, never 
can be anything but a philosophy derived from great 
universal facts ; facts logically arranged, not by the 
heart, but by the head. Christian experience verifies it, 
but never formulates it. If the mystics formulate theo- 
logical truth, they go into all sorts of extravagances. 
Christian experience is but the annals of the Gospels 
over again, only in the realm of the spirit ; the blind 
receiving their, sight, the deaf hearing, the dead raised 
to life. It all crystallizes in obedience to the same law. 
When I want to study into the philosophy of God's 
economy ; to come at the balance of the great magni- 
tudes, which make their serene march in the firmament 
of His love ; to see how God can be just and yet justify 
him that believeth, I ask for the guidance of St. 
Paul ; I ask for him whose flight of thought is like that 
of an eagle, and whose wing never tires. When I want 
to get at the heart of the Gospel ; to know the fact 
about God's love, while I let the philosophy go, to be- 
hold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the 
world, I ask for the guidance of St. John. In the 
one I find theology as a science ; in the other theology 
as an experience. 

III. But what is the Christology of Christ ? How does 
He speak of Himself? As already intimated, if any 
Being bearing the human form ever knew Himself, knew 
His mission upon the earth, it was this Jesus of Nazar- 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



J 3 



eth. He walked in the light of the Father's love. He 
.always had this testimony, that He pleased God. What 
does He mean, when He says in the text, " I am the gocd 
shepherd ; the good shepherd giveth his life for the 
sheep?" Is it not the same as when he said, " And I, 
if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me?" 

He conceives, in the first place, of mankind as lost ; 
as wandering over this planet, generation after genera- 
tion, like unshepherded sheep in a wilderness ; having no 
hope, and without God, in the world. He comes here, 
not in the form of some angelic messenger, lighting 
down from Heaven, and speaking to them from a higher 
plane. For His work Flis true humanity is just as need- 
ful as His divinity. He comes here, born of a woman ; 
taking the fashion of this race of lost ones, God's alien- 
ated ones; He, who in Heaven thought it not robbery 
to be equal with God ; with whom the Father was well 
pleased. He comes here in poverty, so that He can have 
a fellow-feeling for the poor. He keeps company with 
publicans and sinners, so that he is called their friend. 
He heals their sicknesses. He preaches to them the 
good news of forgiveness. What is his aim in all this ? 
It is to gather them back to tjie Father's fold ; to estab- 
lish the Kingdom of God among men. Does He suc- 
ceed ? He lives between three and four years as a public 
teacher ; speaks as never man spake ; performs wonders, 
such as never man performed ; appeals to the Sacred 
Book of His own countrymen to substantiate His claims 
to be their Messiah. With what result ? Now I want 
those who believe that Jesus Christ came here merely as 



14 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



a teacher, to look at this fact, that, while the testimony 
of the ages is that He is, what He never called Himself, 
the Great Teacher ; while all other human teachers pale 
before him their ineffectual fires ; when He died, He 
had gathered around Himself twelve disciples and a few 
women, and the Jewish populace cried, " Not this man, 
but Barabbas ! Away with Him ! crucify Him ! crucify 
Him ! ' ' He, whose dominion was to be from sea to sea, 
and from the river unto the ends of the earth ! Doubt- 
less, the grandest factor of His errand here had not yet 
been reached. 

Mark this : In the text this Jesus of Nazareth does not 
conceive of Himself merely as a shepherd. Up to the 
time of His death He had not begun to draw all men to 
Himself. He conceives of Himself as a shepherd who 
proposes to put Himself between this flock of lost ones 
and death • this great human march of the generations 
and eternal ruin. " The good shepherd giveth His life 
for the sheep." The first function of the shepherd is 
to feed the flock. But the shepherd has another function, 
that of protection; that of deliverance. You remember 
what the stripling David said in the presence of King Saul: 
" Thy servant kept his father's sheep, and there came a 
lion and a bear and took a lamb out of the flock, and I 
went out after him and smote him and delivered it out 
of his mouth, and when he arose against me I caught 
him by his beard, and smote him and slew him." Thy 
servant slew both the lion and the bear. And Dr. 
Thomson, in his "Land and the Book," says he has 
known more than one case where the faithful shepherd 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



has died in defense of his flock from the attacks of wild 
beasts, and he mentions one man who was actually 
hacked to pieces by three Bedouin robbers and died 
among the sheep he was defending. Now read again 
the words of the context: "I am the good shepherd 
and know my sheep, and am known of mine. And I 
lay down my life for the sheep." 

The greatest difficulty which the human mind dis- 
covers in the economy of God is this : That he has 
created a race of beings to whom such a struggle as we 
read of in all the ages, as we witness, is incident ; and 
yet holds Himself aloof from it ; does nothing to miti- 
gate its severity, or to afford us relief. You say :. "This 
vicarious nature of the Atonement is a figment of theo- 
logians ; is unreasonable." I tell you that its first 
function is precisely here ; to prove that the Creator is 
not a cold and distant spectator of this struggle; that 
He is in it Himself; that He has pitted Himself as man's 
champion against sin. One of the greatest mysteries of 
the Godhead, the Incarnation ; another of its greatest 
mysteries, the Atonement ; life in human flesh and blood r 
death in human flesh and blood ; is for this very purpose : 
to show how God stands with reference to evil in human- 
ity ; with reference to sin and to sinners. God is not 
tarrying to see how we shall come out of this struggle. 
In Christ Jesus, His Son, He is involved in this struggle 
with us. 

Dr. Charming thinks Unitarianism better than Ortho- 
doxy, because it gives man a more agreeable idea of God's 
moral government. "He lives," he says, "in the midst 



i6 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



of a glorious universe which was meant to be a witness 
and preacher of the Divinity. ' ' The thing wanted is a 
truthful idea of God's government. Is there no voice of 
sadness arising amid this glorious universe ? Is there no 
deep undertone of discord breaking in upon nature's 
hymn of praise ? And if there is, has it never gone up to the 
ear of God ? And is God indifferent to it ? And if 
not, how does He express Himself? We remember Mrs. 
Browning's " Cry of the Human ": 

" There is no God," the foolish saith; but none, there is no sorrow, 
And nature oft the cry of faith in bitter need will borrow. 
Eyes which the preacher could not school by wayside graves are raised, 
And lips say God be pitiful ! who ne'er said, God be praised. 

The battle hurtles on the plains, earth feels new scythes upon her, 
We reap our brothers for the wrains, and call the harvest honor ! 
Draw face to face, front line to line, one image all inherit — 
Then kill, curse on, by that same sign : clay, clay, and spirit, spirit. 

We pray together at the kirk, for mercy, mercy, solely, solely: 
Hands weary with the evil work, we lift them to the Holy. 
The corpse is calm upon our knee, its spirit bright before Thee ; 
Between them, worse than either, we : without the rest of glory. 

We sit on hills our childhood wist, woods, hamlets, streams beholding: 
The sun strikes through the farthest mist, the city's spire to golden, 
The city's golden spire, it was, when hope and health were strongest; 
But, but now it is the churchyard grass, we look upon the longest. 

And soon all vision waxeth dull : men whisper, " He is dying! " 
We cry no more, " Be pitiful! " we have no strength for crying : 
No strength, no need. Then, soul of mine, look up and triumph 
rather : 

Lo in the depth of God's Divine, the Son abjures the Father ! 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



17 



Only the Son of Man utters the full human cry, " My 
God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me? " 
■ There is no sensitive soul, that looks at life as it is, 
which is not filled with unutterable sadness ; heathenism 
abroad, heathenism at our very doors, heathenism in our 
souls. And, I think, the more a man has the likeness of 
God, the more sadness he must have. Now, if in our 
theology, whether it be that of the head or the heart, for 
I believe they are one in the true believer, we have a 
place for God in Christ ; for God in the Man of sorrows, 
and acquainted with grief ; if God in His infinite father- 
hood, if Christ in his infinite brotherhood is there ; I do 
not say the mystery of God's government is all solved, 
but I say it is greatly relieved. I say, if in our theology 
God is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not 
imputing their trespasses unto them, then He has not 
left us alone ! • • 

I do not hold to the mere juridical theory of the 
Atonement ; that is, that Christ was our substitute on the 
cross, and now that God accepts us on purely forensic 
grounds. This is anatomic theology ; true, but not all 
the truth ; any more than the bones are all the body. I 
believe that God accepts the believer in Christ Jesus ; 
but the condition of this acceptance, on the believer's 
side, is faith. And here comes in the experimental, the 
mystical theology, which is no more all of theology than 
flesh and blood are all of the body. Nor would the mere 
juridical view be in harmony with the context. It is not 
enough for the Good Shepherd to give His life for the 
sheep. Here is where the most valiant of earthly shep- 



i8 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



herds fails of being a type of Christ. The earthly shep- 
herd falls amid his sheep about to die, for after his death 
who can protect them ? But how about the Good Shep- 
herd ? The Good Shepherd lays down his life that He 
may take it again ; and that he may awaken it in the 
lost, unsheperded ones for whom He dies. And not until 
He has risen again and ascended to His Father and the 
Holy Spirit, the Comforter, has been shed forth does 
even His perfect work move the hearts of men. It is 
only then it is interpreted to them. 

The Christology, the science of Christ, we hold is 
worthless unless it move us to a Christ-like life ; that is, 
a life along His line of work, a life whose upward carri- 
age springs from love to God and the desire to please 
Him ; if we do not put ourselves under humanity to com- 
fort, to raise, to serve it even as He did. If Christ died 
for us, and we believe it and feel it, it is the main-spring 
of all our living ! The Christian morality of this gen- 
eration of Christians has sprung from just this source. I 
mean parents believing this have trained up those who 
.are now men and women from the belief in a vicarious 
atonement. This is St. Paul's interpretation of the bear- 
ing of this work of Christ upon our lives. Christ in our 
stead then; we in Christ's ste^d now. "And that He 
died for all, that they which live should henceforth not 
live unto themselves, but unto Him who died for them." 
St. John has the same inference : " Hereby perceive we 
the love of God for us, because He laid" down His life 
for us ; and we ought to lay down our lives for the 
brethren." The height a stream of water will rise, de- 



/ 



CHRIST HIS OWN INTERPRETER. 



I 9 



pends upon the head it has among the hills. The height 
of our Christian morality is to be determined in the 
same way. If it have its head in loving God, because 
He has first loved us, if it spring from love to God in- 
carnate for our sakes, love to God in Christ, reconciling 
the world unto Himself, that is one kind of morality. 
It makes heroes and heroines. It makes martyrs. If we 
accept the Good Shepherd as laying down His life for 
us ; if in our lives we are baptized into His sacrificial 
death, then we have a right to claim freedom from the 
consequences of sin through Him Then is it true that 
we have beheld the Lamb of God which taketh away the 
sin of the world. 

I've seen the Good Shepherd in the hands of His foes, 
His back was sore smitten from their pitiless blows ; 
His brow was encircled with the thorns pressed above, 
But, ah ! it was kingly and so radiant with love. 

O Shepherd, Good Shepherd ! there thus nailed to the tree, 
Thy hands they have wounded, and Thy side, too, I see ; 
Thy face has strange pallor, and how labored Thy breath, 
Thou'rt walking the Valley of the Shadow of Death. 

O Shepherd, Good Shepherd! my poor name write it now, 
In blood that down trickles from Thy feet and Thy brow ; 
And there where they've wounded with the spear-thrust Thy side. 
They've cloven a refuge where a sinner may bide. 

O Shepherd. Good Shepherd ! Thou art gone up on high, 
Art seated in glory in Thy own native sky ; 
The love that once ransomed is a love that will keep, 
Good Shepherd, that gavest thus Thy life for the sheep, 



II. 



HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SO UND WORDS. 



2 Tim. i, 13 : " Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou 
hast heard from me in faith and love, which is in Christ Jesus." 

Every fresh generation comes upon the stage, saying 
to the world, " Behold, I make all things new." And 
in a certain sense this is true. Every new generation 
fashions its own habiliments of thought and of life. 
Spring creeps upon winter with the same prophecy; 
seems to herself to have changed the whole framework 
of things, because she has clothed them anew; because 
:she is the dress-maker among the seasons. She does not 
remember that all her freshness and beauty, whether of 
tree, vegetable, or grass, is rooted and nourished in the 
old ; and that the very bones of the earth, her minerals, 
-are all the time contributing to the earth's graces. The 
soil, which is not indebted to the rocks, is barren ; has 
nothing to give forth in verdure. 

The newness, which passes upon the new generation, 
of humanity's thought, comes out of the old earth, the 
everlasting hills ; just as it is in nature. The fathers, 
where are they ? And the prophets, do they live forever ? 



2 2 HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 

The fathers are in their children, and the prophets do 
live in the fulfillment of their predictions. The litera- 
ture of the Bible is quite as much alive among men as 
its theology and its ethics. Young men sometimes dis- 
cuss the question, " What is originality ?' ' It is a pretty 
conclusive way to answer this question to say, what every 
thinking man knows, that beyond the works of a limited 
number of great minds, naturally or supernaturally in- 
spired, he needs very few books. A few books contain 
it all. The world of thought, like the material world, 
hides her richness in the hills. And the verdure of each 
fresh generation of thought is fed from those hidden 
resources; is spread thinly over the surface, like the 
grass and the trees. All new writers of any freshness 
bring forth new aspects, new relations of old truth. For 
all truth is old ; as old as God. And like love, which 
it is, it has its seat in the bosom of God. 

This is no less true of theology than anything else. 
Each new generation comes, saying of old beliefs : 
" Behold I make all things new !" But, so far as what 
is presented is true, it is old truth in a new light; and so 
far as it is not true, it is old error in a new light. This 
generation has as yet said nothing on eschatology which 
has not been said — I will not say better said — centuries 
ago. The fathers of the early centuries seem to have 
had about the same degree of illumination as has fallen 
to our lot, even in this nineteenth century of the Chris- 
tian era. 

The subject which I shall this morning discuss is 



HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 23 
THE DUTY OF HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 

I. I remark that no thought is definite, so that it can 
be looked at and circumscribed, until it has been put 
into language. It must have landmarks to show that it 
has been taken up. The very word definite implies that 
a thought has been thus defined ; limited, as by meas- 
urement, by actual survey ; fenced in, as by a boundary, 
from something else which does not belong to it ; fenced 
out from something to which it does not belong. There 
is nothing that shows a man how little he knows, and 
how imperfectly he knows it, like getting him to write it 
down. Two disputants, who believe their views are 
world-wide apart, and who can tilt at each for hours, in 
unwritten speech, disagreeing only in definitions, come 
to pin them down to exact language, often find they 
think pretty much alike ; discover they have been fight- 
ing men of straw. Indeed, there is no precise thought 
without precise language. No man has any precise 
thought in any earthly science until he has put it, or 
seen it put, into language. What we speak is breath. 
It goes forth into the air, and never can be gathered 
back again. It is more evanescent than water spilt on 
the ground. You may have been present when an effort 
has been made in some legislative body to have recorded 
the unfortunate utterance of some member who is charged 
with having violated the proprieties of the place. It is 
next to impossible to get his exact words. It is always 
impossible to repeat his intonations and inflexions. But 
what a man puts down in black and white, as we say ; 



24 HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 

what he writes down, he looks at as an entity, his own 
creation. Thought is spirit ; language embodying that 
thought is spirit incarnate. The Jews wanted the Roman 
Governor to modify the inscription which he had put 
above the Cross. He replied : " What I have written, I 
have written." Many a man will make a bargain with 
you, which, if not put in writing, he will upon occasion 
violate. It has been urged that all marriage contracts 
ought to be put into writing. Why not ? None are 
more important. Why should not a man be compelled 
to say in words, over his own signature, that which he so 
thoughtlessly and so insinuatingly suggests, by look, 
tone, gift; in a thousand nameless ways? 

If all thought needs to be put into language in order 
to limit it, to make it definite and precise, this is espe- 
cially true in religion. Religion has to do with what in 
its very nature is vague and indistinct, because it relates 
to the unseen world : because it relates to spirit instead 
of matter. 

In his synthetic philosophy, Herbert Spencer has 
shown how difficult it is to form a distinct conception of 
some things with which we seem to be most familiar : the 
earth for example. "When on the seashore we note how 
the hulls of distant vessels are hidden below the horizon, 
and how of still remoter vessels only the uppermost sails 
are visible, we realize with tolerable clearness the slight 
curvature of that portion of the sea's surface which lies 
before us. But when we seek in imagination to follow 
out its curved surface as it actually exists, slowly bending 



HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 25. 

round until all its meridians meet in a point eight thou- 
sand miles below our feet, we find ourselves utterly baf- 
fled. We cannot conceive, in its real form and magni- 
tude, even that small segment of the globe which extends 
a hundred miles on every side of us ; much less of the 
globe as a whole. The piece of rock on which we stand 
can be mentally represented with something like com- 
pleteness. We find ourselves able to think of its top, 
its sides, and its under surfaces at the same time, or so 
nearly at the same time that they seem all present in 
consciousness together; and so we can form what we call 
conception of the rock. But to do the like of the earth 
we find impossible. Yet we habitually speak as though 
we had an idea of the earth, as though we could think 
of it as of minor objects." 

We say of the earth that it is round. This gives our * 
thought definiteness. As taught in the school we con- 
ceive of it as like an apple or a ball ; the ships of the 
ocean like flies crawling around it ; although take it as 
far as the eye or the telescope can reach, it has its hills 
and mountains, its valleys and ocean depths, with an 
average surface which we characterize as flat. We judge 
of the earth by what we have under our feet, under our 
eye. We judge of the animal and vegetable life upon it 
by what we see around us. We judge of the people in 
the same manner. But when we come to conceive of it 
as one great planet, with all its material varieties and 
diversities ; with its millions of beings like ourselves ; 
with its greater millions of inferior animals in earth, sea 
and air ; with its fauna and flora, according to its lati- 



1 



26 HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 

tude ; then we break down. It is not knowable. It is 
not knowable to us by one act of cognition, or a great 
many acts put together. 

There are those who say that since our knowledge of 
God is so indefinite and imperfect, since it is impossible 
for us to conceive of Him as one whole, it is better that 
we should not put our thoughts into language at all. 
The argument is just as good when applied to the earth. 
Our knowledge of the earth is indefinite and imperfect. 
It is impossible for us to conceive of the earth as a whole. 
The rotundity of the earth, made up of mountain heights 
and ocean depths, seems almost an impossible thing. 
The earth round, with mountains so high, with oceans 
so deep ! But we still keep speaking of it as round ; 
indeed we still keep proving it to be round, by sailing 
around it. It is true there is not an attribute of God 
that is knowable by mental cognition. We say He is a 
spirit. But what is a spirit ? We say He is infinite. 
But what is infinite ? We say He is eternal. But what 
is eternity? We say He is unchangeable. But what is 
unchangeableness ? In the same sense that we know 
nothing about the rotundity of the earth, so we know 
nothing about God. We cannot conceive of one of His 
attributes. But is that any reason why we should not 
try to put our belief about Him, our thought about Him, 
into words ? The more difficult of apprehension a sub- 
ject may be, the more important for us to try and get 
some definite conception of thought about it. The rea- 
son why some religious denominations have no definite 
belief is because they have never tried to put their belief 



HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 27 

into words. Words would have precipitated it, as rain 
is precipitated by condensation ; would have crystallized 
it, as water is crystallized by freezing. Words would 
show them what they do believe ; perhaps that they be- 
lieve nothing. 

A great deal has been said in this generation in dis- 
paragement of creeds, as though creeds were a kind of 
infernal machine, where the mind of man is racked 
and his freedom impinged on by the Christian Churches. 
But a creed is only the form of thought, the formulated 
thinking, in any generation respecting God and the 
things of God. The creed-makers have been the great 
benefactors of the race. They have made the knowledge 
of men definite. They have challenged errors, that in 
ghostly guise have gone stalking over the field of thought, 
and made them down, while truth has taken their place. 

II. No thought in theology is safe, can be kept, unless 
it is put into words. The science of God and of man 
in his relation to God is condemnatory of man, is min- 
atory toward him, as he is by nature. Nothing is more 
natural than that man should antagonize it. It antago- 
nizes him, as he is here in the world, as he lives, as he 
dies. If he can he will try to wrest it, as the direction 
of light is wrested, bent from directness, by passing 
through the medium of water, He always will wrest it 
unless he be put upon his guard. 

The latest test to which the destructive criticism is 
subjecting Revelation is what is called our ethical con- 
sciousness. This means the inward law of morals, which 
humanity - finds within itself ; what it conceives to be 



28 HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 

equitable and honorable as between man and God. If 
there is anything which purports to have come from 
God that conflicts with this ethical consciousness, or 
offends it, that the higher criticism rejects. There is 
nothing new in this position. It is the position which 
all rationalists take with regard to what is tested by pure 
reason. We say of things that God has revealed, that 
they do not accord with our reason, and therefore we 
will not receive them. This is rationalism. The Bible 
is to go up or down, according as it does or does not 
accord with our reason. ' When the missionaries told 
the Emperor of Siam that they came from a country 
where water became so solid that his royal elephants 
could walk on it, he replied that they had told him lies 
enough before, but this was the greatest lie of them alL 
He knew nothing about the law by which at a certain 
temperature water crystallizes into ice. But we have 
been familiar with such a law from our birth. Nearly 
all the wonders of modern civilization may well chal- 
lenge the faith of the pagan nations; the movements 
of machinery by the power of steam ; the transmission 
of thought on the wings of light ; the hearing of the 
human voice hundreds of miles from the speaker ! Tested 
by the reason of pagan nations, what more impossible ? 
But the difference between the civilized and the barba- 
rian is not like the difference between the infinite and 
the finite. There may be infinite laws, which are as 
much beyond the power of finite reason to grasp, to 
recognize, as the laws of modern discoveries are beyond 
the reason of the heathen. A thing may seem unrea- 



HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 29 

sonable to us, only because it transcends our powers of 
thought ; it is in a sphere beyond any of our observa- 
tion or experience. So much for rationalism. 

Our ethical consciousness, as it is called, is the ethical 
consciousness of a fallen race. And here we have not 
merely the disability of being finite, as against God's 
being infinite, but the greater disability of being sinful, 
as against God's being holy. Our ethical standards are 
unsafe because the ethics of our lives are the precise 
sphere in which God's law bears upon us disagreeably. 
God says "Thou shalt, and thou shalt not." There is a 
homely proverb : 

" No man e'er felt the halter draw, 
With good opinion of the law." 

The ethical consciousness of a rogue is not the ethical 
consciousness of an honest man. Of the men under 
conviction of crime to-day not one in a hundred feels 
that he has been honestly tried and condemned. I never 
talked much with a man under sentence of crime who 
did not seem to find it difficult to keep from arguing 
over and over again that he ought not to have been con- 
victed. It was a monomania with him. The ethical 
consciousness of the penitent thief was : "And we justly; 
but this man hath done nothing amiss. ' ' A man who 
sees his sins through the tearful eyes of a penitent, while 
he gets glimpses of the rainbow of God's love, does not 
forget that the ominous clouds against which this rain- 
bow lies are big with the thunders of wrath, the penalties 
of law ; and that even this rainbow-form has been 
abstracted from that blackness of darkness lately rup- 



30 HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 

tured by a thunder-burst, and yielding up its contents, 
to bless his soul. 

The ethical consciousness of man is good, so far as it 
goes ; as to what we can trust it for. But it always de- 
pends upon whether he is an interested party. It was 
the custom of Socrates before answering a question put 
by a disciple to ask the questioner, what manner of man 
he was himself ? No judge of any character would try a 
case where the decision was to affect himself, his name, 
his property. He would see that his ethical conscious- 
ness could not be relied on for this. God did not allow 
King David to sit on his own case, as between himself 
and Uriah, the Hittite. He knew he could not be 
trusted. The man who could so maliciously plot such a 
wrong thing, and could so ignominiously hide it, needed 
to see his sin masquerade before him, under another's 
name before his ethical consciousness was fit to be trusted. 
There are sins as to which it is comparatively safe to 
trust a man's ethical consciousness. They are the sins 
which are committed by his neighbor, and especially by 
his neighbor against himself. The instinct of the ethical 
consciousness is immediate. It says, " The man that 
hath done this thing shall surely die. ' ' 

The ethical consciousness is not an organ like the eye ; 
or, rather like the eye, the ethical consciousness is not a 
cold and dead organ, to be looked through by somebody 
else. It is the man himself looking at great moral ques- 
tions. What makes the eye of an opium-eater unreliable, 
is that he is an opium-eater, and the drug has impaired 
the correctness of his vision. A medical man would 



HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 3 1 

say: "The perceptive cerebral centres are blunted." 
It is not somebody else looking through his eye that sees 
imperfectly, whose vision is impaired. It is himself. 
The Bible says : "There is a way that seemeth right to 
a man ; but the end thereof are the ways of death. ' ' 
Why should a way seem right when it is not right ? This 
is the sphere of man's ethical consciousness ; can he not 
trust it ? And if it is unreliable once, may it not be un- 
reliable again ? Ah ! the perceptive cerebral centres of 
his soul are blunted. We speak of a chronometer, which 
keeps perfect time ; of a chronometer which has not lost 
a minute in years. But chronometers are not made of 
material utterly imperishable ; which are wholly imper- 
vious to the changes of heat and cold. Possibly a chro- 
nometer may fail at last, may fail a man in an emergency, 
in a case of life and death. But a man's ethical con- 
sciousness is liable to fail him at any time ; in any case 
in which he is interested. 

Take the case of St. Peter, when the Saviour took the 
disciples and began to tell them the strange shadows 
which overhung Him in Jerusalem, to which he was go- 
ing. What said Peter's ethical consciousness to this ? 
"Be it far from Thee, Lord; this thing shall not be 
done unto Thee. ' ' This thing was the event which has 
since occupied the thought of the world ; the event of 
which, as we interpret it, skeptical men say : " It is in- 
famous to attribute such a thing, the suffering of the in- 
nocent for the guilty, to a just God !'" This is the way 
Peter felt. Peter loved his Lord, even though his love 
was so inconstant and passionate. He thought he was 



32 HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 

ready to die for Him. Anpl if death had come from 
his first sword-stroke he. was ready. And under the im- 
pulse of his love, Peter's ethical consciousness led him to 
remonstrate against his Master's being subjected to suf- 
fering. Peter's ethical consciousness was perverted by 
his sensibility. The thing against which he remonstrated,, 
was the most consummate display of God's love. 

The great thinker, Coleridge, has said : "If prudence, 
though practically inseparable from morality, is not to be 
confounded with moral principle, still less may sensibil- 
ity ; that is, a constitutional quickness of sympathy with 
pain and pleasure, and a keen sense of the qualifications 
that accompany social intercourse, mutual endearments, 
and reciprocal preferences, be mistaken or deemed a sub- 
stitute for either. Sensibility is not even a sure pledge 
of a good heart, though among the most common mean- 
ings of that many-meaning and too-commonly mis- 
applied expression. So far from being morality, or one 
with the moral principle, it ought not even to be placed 
in the same rank with prudence. For prudence, at least, 
is an offspring of the understanding ; but sensibility, the 
sensibility I mean, here spoken of, is for the greater part 
a quality of the nerves, and a result of individual bodily 
temperament." John Foster had too much sensibility 
to be a safe judge as to the nature and duration of future 
punishment. 

The Saviour teaches that not even the sparrow falleth 
to the ground without our Father. And elsewhere we 
read that God's tender mercies are over all his works. 
Are we to infer from this that if we break or defy the 



HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 33 

laws which He has put into the constitution of things we 
shall not suffer for it ? Apply your ethical consciousness 
to the Gay Head disaster, where a steamer loaded with 
passengers just from their homes and almost in sight of 
them, runs upon a ledge of rocks, and goes to pieces. 
What message has such an event as this, to those who 
believe that they can test the doctrines of the Bible, the 
principles of God's government, by their ethical con- 
sciousness ? Is not the same God who is in providence, 
also in the Bible, in the kingdom of grace? 

III. Holding fast the form of sound works is the only 
way to mark and insure progress in the truth. The form 
of sound words is the way-mark of thought in the advance 
toward clearer light. 

Every now and then a man or a class of men get the 
idea that they have made a great discovery ; are leading 
off a grand movement. Like the commander of the 
awkward squad at an old-fashioned country muster, they 
give the word of command " Forward, march !•' and ex- 
pect the whole generation of thinkers are following after 
them, when, lo ! upon looking around they are all alone ; 
they are great leaders in epaulettes and feathers, forsooth ; 
but no man follows them ! The first thing that a man 
has to do who thinks he has made a discovery worthy of 
being patented ; a discovery which all the world will 
want, is to pore over the files of the Patent Office, to see 
if some one has not been there before him. Now we go 
to the Apostle's Creed, so-called, and find that, accord- 
ing to this symbol, Christ decended into hell ; into 
hades as at first intended, or as Pearson in his work 



34 HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 

on the Creed makes claim, into the literal grave. If, 
therefore, there is any progress in the eschatology of the 
New Movement, it is progress backward ; backward how- 
ever, not to the primitive churches, but to the middle ages. 
For, according to Pearson, the primitive churches 
thought just as Protestant Christendom has thought. 

How do we know there has been any advance in any 
human science ? It is by comparing what was once be- 
lieved and taught with what is now believed and taught ; 
that is, the creed of the past with that of the present. 
There was a time, antecedent to which medical men did 
not believe in the circulation of the blood in vertebrated 
animals. There was a time antecedent to which botan- 
ists did not believe in the circulation of sap. But there 
have been no such discoveries in the science of theology. 
The progress of thought in theological science, in the 
science of God, has been rather in the art of better stat- 
ing what the Bible teaches and the relations of the dif- 
ferent parts of the Bible truth. This theory that our 
ethical conciousness shall determine what is ethical truth 
fit for God to reveal, is not in the line of theological 
progress. Theological progress, at least in evangelistic 
schools of thought, has never assumed to eliminate any- 
thing which the Bible teaches, on the score that it ought 
not to be in the Bible. It has treated Revelation rever- 
ently, as all true science treats God's works. It has not 
undertaken to set up a theological orrery and say thus 
the great planets revolve ; and if they do not, so much 
the worse for them. God did not make the system ; 
or, if He did, He is not a God of skill and power and love. 



HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 35 

It is a singular illustration of the unanimity of Chris- 
tian thought during the Christian era, that there are only 
three grand symbols of doctrine which have been ever 
adopted by believers. And they are in substance one. 
There has been activity, movement; but it has been 
around the same great centres which draw all things 
toward themselves. And it is because of the unanimity 
of Christian experience. The ethical character of the 
Atonement, forensically conceived and stated, may be 
as directly and summarily defined from Christian expe- 
rience as in another way. Here is a sinner ; no longer 
a philosopher, no longer a theologian. How does it 
affect the heart of this man to be told that the Son of 
God, who knew no sin, became sin for him ? It is Saul 
of Tarsus \ not philosophizing, but repenting, blindly 
feeling after God, if perhaps he may find him ; finding 
no place for the sole of his feet in that horrible pit and 
miry clay, till he comes to the thought, which he after- 
wards expressed for all ages: " God commendeth His 
love to us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died 
for us." There is a moment when the ethical conscious- 
ness of a sinner is prepared to see God in Christ Jesus, 
reconciling the world unto Himself, and to find beauty 
in Him, such that He is desirable. And as it is with 
Paul, so it is with Augustine , so it is with you and me. 

No army can move safely without carrying its impedi- 
menta ; its things that hinder ; its commissariat with it. 
The impedimenta of the great army of God moving on 
into the ages is the truth as it is experienced. The form of 
sound words is dear indeed, because hallowed by sacred 



36 HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 

memories ; because confessed by ancestors, which it has 
inspired ; it is dear, because we have confessed it ; but 
it is especially dear, because it is equally written upon 
the tablet of our hearts ; and we know that God has 
revealed it to us by His Spirit. There is no sense in 
which it is true that God's Spirit is moving upon the 
hearts of men, to reveal to them new religious truth. 
God's Spirit is. an interpreter. He shows us, in our 
hearts, what God means in the Bible. But our Christian 
experience is in no proper sense a new revelation. It is 
the old revelation, with foot-notes, written by the hand 
that for our offence was nailed to the Cross. It is the 
old revelation, with addenda and appendices, which are 
personal to us. 

The holding fast of the form of sound words, my 
brethren, is sometimes looked at as a light matter. Some 
hold them fast ; others let them go, and are glad to get 
rid of them. People in these days pay a premium to 
the man who calls himself liberal. Liberal of what? 
Liberal of the truth as God has declared it, and as the 
saints of all ages have believed it ! What right has any 
man to give away what does not belong to him ; what 
belongs only to God ? Liberal indeed ! As though it 
were a matter of indifference, or a matter of taste, or a 
matter of convenience, or a matter of society. Liberal 
of what God teaches us to hold fast ! Why, the more 
of God's truth a man gives away, the more he gives 
himself away ; the more he destroys himself. Man lives 
not by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth 
out of the mouth of God. It is not for us to believe as 



HOLDING FAST THE FORM OF SOUND WORDS. 



37 



little as we can, but as much as we can, of the truth that 
God has taught, This is what makes us children of 
•God; rooted and grounded in God, and thoroughly 
furnished for the work of God ! 

Faith of the fathers ! Hold it fast, 

Though foe on foe assail it ; 
'Twas wrought 'neath persecution's blast, 
Shall martyrs' children fail it? 

Faith of the fathers ! Be it mine, 

Against all odds to hold it ; 
Sealed with their blood, as truth divine, 

And told as they have told it. 

Faith of the fathers ! Hand it down 

To latest generation, 
One God, one Lord, one cross, one crown, 

One free and full salvation ! 

Faith of the fathers ! It shall stand 

At that last day appalling ; 
When at the Judge's great command 

The worlds, like leaves, are falling. 

Faith of the fathers ! On that day 
One word that Christ has spoken, 

Though heaven and earth shall pass away, 
One word shall not be broken ! 



III. 



THE BACE SOLVENT. 



Colossians ill: II. "Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, 
circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free; 
but Christ is all, and in all." 

The old alchemists believed that there was a univer- 
sal solvent, which would transmute the baser metals into 
gold; that they could reduce them all down to one base, 
and that would be gold. It was a visionary dream. 
It was the delusion of a day. And yet it bore the bur- 
den of a great truth ; of the greatest truth. Humanity, 
in its race differences and antagonisms ; in its prejudices ; 
in its class-competitions and caste-abominations, is like 
these baser metals. It needs some universal solvent to 
bring out its gold. Even its religions have only multi- 
plied and intensified these differences. There is no 
odium like the odium theologicum. There is no con- 
tempt for the publican, ay, for ordinary humanity, 
like the contempt of the Pharisee ; the separated one, 
ay, the one most separated to God, the Father of us all. 
In the apostle's day the Jew despised the Greek; the 
Greek the Jew. The world was full of divisions ethnic, 
race-divisions, divisions civil, divisions social. Every 



40 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



thing that keeps men from each other keeps them from 
God. The Hebrew mistook and misinterpreted his re- 
lation to man because of his relation to God, thinking 
that the drawing by which he was drawn to God was 
centrifugal toward humanity ; drew him out of human- 
ity's circles, not finding out that the nearer a man comes 
to God the nearer he is to every creature of God ; and 
that we cannot love Him, who begat, without loving the 
humblest ever begotten of Him, and that the Divine 
Fatherhood of God implies as its complement the uni- 
versal brotherhood of man. 

The fathers of this Republic ; great men, wise men ; 
began their immortal work at the throne of God as a 
Creator. This was their point of departure : God the 
Creator ; man the creature. Because man had one Crea- 
tor, and because with Him was no respect of persons, 
they proclaimed all men free and equal and entitled to 
certain rights which could not be alienated ; which they 
took with them wherever they went. And, yet, from a 
certain class, before one hundred years had elapsed, this 
great, free people had legislated away every one of these 
rights. There were three millions of God's creatures 
among them who had been stolen from their native 
Africa, and who had been robbed of every right which 
had come from God ; who had not a right which they 
were bound to respect. They were transported across 
the great seas like cattle ; they were sold on the auction- 
block ; they were stripped of their children, and the earth 
was dumb, and the very heavens seemed brass to their 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



41 



petitions. Then came the thunder-peal of God's judg- 
ments ; then came the lightning character of His wrath. 
We heard, we saw, and we trembled. Then came our 
great moral awakening. We listened to the voice of 
God. And, upon our knees; the enemy's cannon still 
ringing in our ears, and their bayonets still flashing their 
fateful light in our eyes ; we said to God, we said to the 
whole civilized world: "We have been very guilty 
concerning our brother ; we took off his birth-right coat 
and parted it among us ; we cast him into that pit ; 
we sold him to those slave -merchants ; we sent him 
down to Egypt ; we hurt his feet with fetters ; we strip- 
ped him of every right which God had given him ; the 
right to self, to wife, to children, to property, to country, 
to God." We said, also, to him: "This warfare we 
are waging is not for ourselves ; it is for humanity ; come 
into it like a man and a brother and share the results ; 
take this gun ; put on this uniform ; stand side by side 
with us ; go with us down into that valley of death, and 
when the conflict is over, share with us equally the right 
which God has given you ; of which we have so cruelly 
dispossessed you." And he who had been praying and 
waiting so long, he thought we meant it ; he took us at 
our word. 

But how is it to-day? Citizenship to him means 
living under a flag which cannot protect him in 
the enjoyment of his civil and political rights ; a flag 
which sweetly beckoned him to the battle-field, and now 
flaps its folds in weakness over him. We say: "You, 



42 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



who were once entertained at first-class hotels and rode 
in first-class cars for your masters' sakes, and society took 
no offence ; the Government which took you from the 
hands of your masters in arms to destroy it, cannot help 
you. Go back to the ante-bellum period ; your citizen- 
ship a mockery and disgrace ; not serfs in name, but 
pariahs in fact. This is what we now conclude to be 
the meaning of our contract with our brother in black. 
This is our sober second thought, as we wrap ourselves 
in our judicial robes of silk. We, every one of whose 
steps to any high position, civil and social, has been a 
step which has been born of resistance to oppression, 
and has been purchased with blood. We take back the 
hand we stretched out to our brother in the day of our 
distress, for him to help us, and leave him to struggle 
there in the horrible pit and the miry clay into which 
slavery dragged him ; a citizen of the United States, and 
yet not a citizen of the several States thereof. Well, 
probably it is best so. 

Doubtless, politics is not the universal solvent. Our 
fathers tried it, and it failed them. We have tried it 
with the same result. It promises more than it ever per- 
forms. When France dismantled her churches and 
boasted that she had a better gospel than they had given 
her ; when she abolished the Lord's day and divided the 
weeks into tens instead of sevens ; when her wild citi- 
zens, drunk with the blood of kings and nobles, like so 
many demons, sang the Marseillaise in her barricaded 
streets, she thought the millennium had dawned. But 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



43 



the light of that day was the lurid light of the pit. It 
was all done in the name of liberty and equality. God 
was gone, religion was gone. All that France needed 
was citizenship. It was only the oppressed rising up in 
a paroxysm of power to wreak themselves on their long- 
time oppressors ; it was only the tyranny of the people 
versus the tyranny of the kings ; the people crowding 
into days the vengeance of centuries. It has become 
very plain in these latter days that a true republic is 
impossible without a Christian basis. The Deistic basis 
is not enough ; least of all the Atheistic. There needs 
to be not only a God and Father, but a God-Man who is 
God and brother. And the subject which I shall dis- 
cuss this morning, is 

THE CROSS OF CHRIST THE ONLY SOLVENT FOR RACE DIF- 
FERENCES. 

" Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision 
nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free; 
but Christ is all, and in all." 

i. The Cross of Christ proves man's universal broth- 
erhood. If He is our Brother-man we are His brother- 
men. Our Revolutionary fathers thought creation proved 
man's universal brotherhood. This is the gospel of the 
Declaration. It proves it just as creation proves a God : 
only to the Christian mind. Every Christian finds the 
Creator in creation ; every Christian finds his brother- 
man in the created, just in proportion as he is a Chris- 
tian. For nearly one hundred years this nation did not 
find a brother-man in a creature of God. It found 



44 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



only a human chattel, to be bought and sold. Not until 
Christ has anointed his blind eyes with eye-salve, does 
man in the pride of race, of birth, of culture, in his 
carnal aristocracy; which is just as carnal as any other 
carnal thing, though he is often very proud of it; actually 
assent to the truth that the most degraded of human 
beings has a right to call him brother-man ; has a right 
to his sympathy and help as a brother-man ; to give him 
signals of distress, as though he belonged to the same 
guild. He admits the fact, but he does not enact it. 

Terence, who had been a slave, could put it into his 
drama, " Nothing which concerns man is foreign to me. ' ' 
It is a negative statement, like all pagan sentiments of 
humanity; like Confucius' negative of the golden rule. 
It remained for a nobler Roman than he, who did not 
write dramas, to be cheered by the Roman populace, 
but who, in the great world-drama, higher than that of 
which Shakespeare writes in the prologue to Henry V. : 
" A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, 
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene ;" 

it remained for a nobler Roman, in the great world- 
drama, of which the author of the Epistle to the He- 
brews speaks, when he reminds us that we are compassed 
about by a cloud of witnesses unseen ; a nobler Roman 
than he, to put it, pulsating with his own life-blood, in- 
terpreted beyond the possibility of mistake, into human 
history, into the history of the kingdom of God. "Who 
is weak, and I am not weak ? Who is offended, and I burn 
not ?" Brand another man and you brand me. 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



45 



Where did he learn this ? At the feet of Gamaliel ? 
At the feet of Gamaliel he learned quite another gospel. 
He learned to glory not in infirmities but in advantages. 
He learned to glory in that high plane of privilege, on 
which he walked as a Jew; in the adoption, in the giving 
of the law, in the promises; just as many of us have gloried 
in the battles of freedom, civil and religious, in the old 
world and the new; in the prowess of the Anglo-Saxon 
name, and in the red-hot currents which flow in the 
Anglo-Saxon blood, rather than in our infirmities for 
the Indian, the African, the Asiatic. For here was a 
man who could ride down his feeble and innocent fellow- 
creatures on horseback, like a true knight of ku-klux- 
ism. And precisely such a man, Jesus of Nazareth found 
him, on the way to Damascus. Where did he learn this : 
"Who is weak and I am not weak ? Who is offended, 
and I burn not ? ' ' He learned it where only it is to 
be learned. Not in French politics ! No ! Not in 
American politics ; but at the feet of Him who for our 
offences was nailed to the Cross of Calvary. Those 
feet were maimed with nails by this principle. It was 
not in Gamaliel ; it was not in his own Judaism, or 
Pharisaism ; it was not in pagan civilization ; it was only 
in Him, who can be touched with the feeling of our 
infirmities ; in Him, who, when He thought it not rob- 
bery to be equal with God, took the form of a servant 
and sanctified it forevermore ; and being found in fashion 
as a man, humbled himself and became obedient unto 
death, even the death of the cross. 



46 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



When we take this bread and drink this wine what do 
we do? We symbolize Christ's human brotherhood. 
This he did for humanity's sake. What taint of Juda- 
ism had He ? What recognition did He ever make that 
He belonged to any single nationality ? to any single 
tribe ? to any single class ? Is he Brother-man to the Jew 
only, because he was born of a Jewish mother ? Is he any 
less Brother-man to the Gentile ? to the Greek ? to the 
Roman ? to the barbarian ? to the Scythian ? to the 
bond ? to the free ? When we eat this bread we eat that 
which sets forth, what ? God manifest in the flesh ; God 
manifest in the flesh of humanity. Not because we are 
Anglo-Saxon, and have the Anglo-Saxon Bible, the 
Anglo-Saxon literature, the Anglo-Saxon civilization, 
the Anglo-Saxon freedom and manhood, of which we 
are so proud, have you and I a claim to this Brother- 
Man. It is because we are on the same human level 
with the other races, from which we so much differ, and 
above which God has given us such an exaltation. For 
such were we. It is because we are brother-men to 
Frederick Douglass, 'and Sitting Bull, and the lost 
Chinaman, who has been smuggled from the Celestial 
Kingdom because this continent is too narrow for him 
and us. It is because we are so low, and not because we 
are so high, that we have a right to sit here, to eat this 
bread, and to drink this cup. This broken bread is the 
emblem, not of Anglo-Saxon humanity, but of lost, de- 
graded, fallen humanity. 

II. The Cross of Christ interprets man's universal 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



47 



brotherhood. It needs to be interpreted. It is the last 
thing that man learns here ; that in Christ Jesus the 
humblest man is his equal. 

Ask almost any man if he wants the elevation of his 
brother-man ; if he wants his brother-man in India, in 
China, in Japan, in the South, on the Pacific coast, 
made his equal ; ay, given a chance to outstrip him in 
the struggle for betterment ; and he will usually answer, 
" Why, yes, of course. Do I not pray for it and con- 
tribute for it?" But will you sacrifice your preju- 
dices for his sake? He needs different religious influ- 
ences ; different educational influences ; different social 
influences ; he needs to feel that he is no longer ostra- 
cised, and that he may aspire for himself and his chil- 
dren, just as you may. Will you adopt him into your 
religious, educational, social circles ? But you reply : 
" That is a society question." It is a society question, 
and you belong to the kingdom of God ; to the unseen 
society, which, by the power of His Cross, this God- 
Man, who took the form of a servant, is gathering out of 
the nations. You have fellowship with Him in His hu- 
miliation for humanity's sake. And yet you propose to 
decide this question according to the laws and usages of a 
society to which you do not belong, out of which God has 
called you, and against whose inhumanity to man, 
against whose worldly pride the Cross is a standard lifted 
up by God Himself. You are under the most sacred of 
bonds to record your testimony as belonging to quite 
other society. In what sense, after all, are we brothers ? 



48 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



Can society answer this question? Can anything but 
the Cross of Christ? The Saviour gives us a picture of 
what it is to be a true neighbor, in the parable of the 
Good Samaritan. " Who, asks He, was neighbor to him 
that fell among thieves ?' ' He that thought it was a soci- 
ety question, a question of caste? He who came and 
looked on him and passed by on the other side ? He that 
put money into the contribution-box for him, or sent 
some one else to help him to the hospital ? No, only the 
man that set him upon his own beast, carried him to an 
inn, and took care of him. By the same law human 
brotherhood, as the Cross interprets it, means more than 
good wishes ; means more than " Be ye warmed and 
filled." It means, in our place and according to our 
measure, taking upon ourselves the burdens and dis- 
abilities under which our brother-man, of whatever 
station, of whatever nationality, is seen to labor, and 
trying, personally, to relieve him. If he is ignorant 
of books we want to teach him books ; if he is ignorant 
of God we want to give him a knowledge of God. If 
he is stripped of his rights and immunities we want to 
stand for him and to lift up our testimony against the out- 
rage. A man cannot live a neighbor to man, if he is 
not living a neighbor . to God, as He is in Christ Jesus. 

Before the war there was organized a benevolent soci- 
ety, whose anniversary occurs the present week ; a soci- 
ety to preach the Gospel among the heathen.* Its foun- 
ders said : ' ' We cannot take money that has been coined 

^American Missionary Association. 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



49 



from slave labor. It is the price of innocent blood. It 
cries up to God for vengeance. It is the price of vio- 
lating the tenderest of human ties ; the most sacred ; of 
trafficking in the bodies and souls of men. We cannot 
touch it. We dare not bring it to God's altar as an 
offering. We dare not go with it in our hands to labo] 
in other lands. The very heathen would spit upon it ; 
would spurn us." It seemed to a great many that the) 
were straining a point ; that they were visionary people. 
Ah ! they saw Him, who is invisible ; Him who will say : 
"Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least." They 
were only remembering those in bonds as bound with 
them ; as branded with them. They were only illus- 
trating their sense of the brotherhood of man as taught 
at the Cross. What is the history of that society ? 
Why, the smoke of our civil contest had hardly cleared 
away before it began to build up the waste places 
of the South ; heaping coals of fire upon the people there. 
Under their auspices, the choicest daughters of New 
England, as though they had been angels of God, 
went down there with the spelling-book and the Bible ; 
took their share of the ostracism meted out to the 
recent bondsmen for Jesus' sake. Many of them laid 
down their lives there. There has scarcely been a for- 
eign missionary field in the world which has had more 
perils, which has demanded greater sacrifices, which has 
developed spirits more heroic, more Christlike. The 
same spirit which led our brave boys to die, to make 
men free, led their sisters to die, to make them holy. 



5° 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



And what do you see to-day ? This society has done 
more to stay the tide of illiteracy, to lay the foundations 
of permanent civil and religious prosperity than all the 
other agencies put together. God's secret is with them 
that fear Him. The men who for Christ's sake said : " We 
cannot set apart to God that which has come from un- 
paid human labor ; we cannot thus have fellowship with 
the works of darkness ; ' ' these men God has put into 
the forefront of the great battle with ignorance and deg- 
radation ; the great battle in which the South begins to 
ask the nation, which cannot protect the black man, to 
come to- her help. They got their baptism at the foot 
of the Cross. Look at the queenly institutions which 
they have planted ; look at the thousands of the sons 
and daughters of Ethiopia, whom they have developed 
in the mental, moral and spiritual stature of true man- 
hood ; whom they have polished after the similitude of 
a palace ; fitted for professions, for business, for home- 
life. Look at the churches they have planted. This is 
their conception of the brotherhood of man as they have 
been taught it at the Cross ; as the Cross has interpreted 
it to them. 

Why is it that you and I have such different standards 
for what is heroic an ourselves, and what is heroic in our 
foreign missionaries ? The foreign missionaries do the 
very things at which we are most reluctant. They live 
with the heathen : they go down upon their hands and 
knees and crawl into their huts. Tenderly brought up 
at home, having received the best of modern culture, 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



5 1 



fitted to shine in the most refined circles, they ostracise 
themselves; they confront the caste-spirit of heathendom; 
nay, of lost humanity; and, perhaps, lay down their lives 
there ; and their dust moulders back to dust in those lands 
of midnight. Why does the Christian Church at home 
calendar their name as saintly, as Christlike ? That man, 
David Livingstone, who buried himself in the heart of 
Africa, as men let themselves down into the mouth of a 
pit where there is fire-damp and death, to save the lost 
there, while the civilized world paused in suspense to 
know whether he was dead or alive; whose companions 
and protectors were for months and years only wild 
Africans; jogging along with his ox-cart, the ark of 
Ethiopian civilization ; or borne in his feebleness, on the 
shoulders of the men whom his likeness to Christ had 
touched to tender issues ; and dying on his knees an object- 
lesson to teach men how they should pray for the heathen; 
that man David Livingstone, whose dust the doors of 
Westminster Abbey swing back, almost of their own 
accord, to receive, and the whole civilized world stand 
with heads uncovered as it is let down to lie beside the 
dust of the kings and counsellors of the earth ; what was 
there in him that we so much honor ? It was his baptism 
into the spirit of his Master, as to lost humanity ; as to the 
black continent of Africa. It was his stretching him- 
self upon the form of that dead continent, as the prophet 
stretched himself upon the form of the dead child of the 
widow of Sarepta, until life came down from God to 
remimate it. And yet, you and I do not know whether 



52 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



it is quite the thing to teach in a negro Sunday-school; 
whether we may not stain our immaculate Christianity 
by sitting in the same pew with an African in God's 
house ; whether our children may not catch the conta- 
gion of heathenism by being taught in the same day 
schools ! And this is in Christian America ! 

III. The Cross of Christ inspires man to acts of uni- 
versal brotherhood. 

Poets sing about it ; politicians and statesmen prog- 
nostigate it ; but nothing else inspires it but the Cross of 
Christ. And modern civilization, tested by this test, 
shows what it owes to Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. 
Modern civilization is a movement toward the preva- 
lence, all over the earth, of the sentiment of human 
brotherhood. Just think how near we are together; how 
we can almost whisper into each other's ears. Shall we, 
in spiritual things, be behind the movement of modern 
material communication ? behind steam, the telegraph, 
the telephone ? Already men talk seriously of reaching 
the Old World ; great, sluggish Asia herself ; across the 
American Continent and Behring's Strait. " And there 
shall be no more sea." And yet races are divided as 
if by impassable seas. 

I do not find fault with the letter of the decision of 
the Supreme Court.* I am disappointed ; I am grieved 
to see law interpeted as against freedom. I presume, 
however, the court has only intended to affirm the facts 
as they exist. Doubtless, the tendency of American 

*Civil Rights Decision. 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



53 



progress is to try to cure everything by legislation. We 
are in too much haste to stop for education ; we say, 
"Give us a law ! " But law is always weak through the 
flesh. It is never strong, except as the spirit is with 
us. And to-day, as we stand under the shadow of the 
Cross, I appeal to a higher court ; I remind my- 
self, I remind you, that from the Cross itself ; from 
our Elder Brother hanging there for humanity' s sake; and 
not from the Declaration of Independence ; and not from 
constitutional amendments ; not from French republi- 
canism, and not from American republicanism, I de- 
rive the law of universal brotherhood. I see it in the 
print of the nails and the spear. I see it in the crown 
of thorns. It is a law as wide as the earth's surface. It 
is on the land ; it is on the deep. It reaches to heaven 
itself. It reaches to that world where men walk in the 
light of God ; where all earthly differences and distinc- 
tions will vanish with the earthly surroundings from 
which we are liberated ; with the robe of flesh which we 
put off. Think you there is a whiter soul gone up from 
the communion of this church than that of John H. 
Cook ? Earthly prejudice was silent in his presence. 
He had more white clients than colored. And when it 
was announced to the judge of the court, where he prac- 
ticed, that he was incurably sick, for a moment the course 
of justice was arrested in its progress, and while he was 
still living the judge pronounced his eulogy. 

In the work that is before us as a Christian people, we 
shall need the inspiration of this law of human brother- 



54 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



hood. Let us look at it. It is a work that must be 
done under the force of this law. It is too great lor 
any other motive. In discussing the lessons of the last 
census, at the recent Inter-State Convention at Louisville, 
Dr. Waite, of the Census Bureau, stated that the illiteracy 
of the South had increased in the ten years from 1870- 
1880, one-half million. That is, that there are one-half 
million more illiterates than in 1870. Dr. Curry, of Rich- 
mond, the superintendent of the Peabody fund, said at the 
same convention, that to-day 30 per cent, of the white 
and 70 per cent, of the negro population of the South 
are illiterate, and that the only solution of the race 
problem in this country is the school and the church. 
And he makes a strong appeal, like the long roll-call of 
an army, to the national government to rise up, and by 
giving national aid to the cause of education, save the 
Republic. Dr. Haygood, another Southern gentleman, 
says : ' ' The colored man never will have his best chance 
there till the reign of the Gospel and common sense." 
This is what I am pleading for. These people ; who 
multiply themselves by ten every one hundred years; 
Dr. Haygood says they have done that in the last 
century • if we can find no place for them in the 
school-houses and the churches ; in the inns, the 
cars, and the steamboats ; are bound to have the 
largest share in the population of the South. Yes, 
and in its illiteracy, too. They rise up like a great 
black cloud in the horizon, and if Howard University, 
and Fiske University, and Hampton Institute ; if the 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



55 



Christian schools and churches of the South; if the 
churches and other benevolent agencies of the North, 
with their millions a year, for the last twenty years, 
have thu s far been fighting a losing battle with illiteracy 
there, the nation may find that though she is so little a 
nation -that she has no power to protect her colored citi- 
zen in his political and civil ' rights, she will require to 
assume some of the prerogatives of a nation in order to 
protect herself against his illiteracy ! 

One fearful element in the problem before us is the 
fact that the illiterate persons of the South are largely 
colored women. The mothers of the children, the 
home-educators, they who give direction to the school 
or from the school ; to the church or from it ; these are 
the majority of illiterate ones ! If there is any depart- 
ment of work for the colored people, which deserves 
emphasis, it is this. ' ' What is wanting, ' ' said Napoleon, 
one day to Madame Cam pan, " in order that the youth 
of France be well educated ? " " Good mothers ! ' ' was 
the reply. " An ounce of mother," said another, " is 
worth a pound of clergy." And another still, "The 
mother's heart is the child's school-room." 

But love of country- is not an undying love. If there 
be patriotism, it shall fail. Appalled by the desolations, 
wearied with the weaknesses, impatient with the incon- 
sistencies and unreasonablenesses of this race when the 
war ended, but little above heathenism, the patriot makes 
a 'law, gives his mite through the Freedman's Bureau and 



5 6 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



turns away. But not so the Christian. If there be love 
of country and country's ideals, it shall fail. The time 
conies when the Declaration of Independence con- 
tains glittering generalities. If there be love of human- 
ity, it shall fail. The time comes, when for humanity's 
sake, man thinks he has done enough. But love for 
Christ never faileth. The more a man does for Christ's 
sake, the more he can do ; the more he gives, the more 
he can give ; the more he bears, the more he can bear. 
This world is to be redeemed, by introducing the life of 
its redeemed ones into its life; as Christ's life has been 
introduced into them. It is to be made one in Christ 
Jesus, by the solvent of the Cross. Just as the life of the 
spirit does not belong to space or time ; has no period, 
no nationality, no clime ; so the love of the spirit. It si 
for the spirit, and not for its investiture. It is for the 
image of God in man ; it is for the citizen of the Repub- 
lic of God, which is coming down from Him to meet 
us. 

My brethren in the Lord, when we seat ourselves 
around the Master's table this morning let us come not 
as Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, bar- 
barian, Scythian, bond and free; but as those to whom 
Christ is all, and in all ; as those who bear each other's 
burdens ; who burn at each other's wrongs ; who sympa- 
thize with each other's sorrows; whose faith and hope, 
whose joys and sorrows, are one and make them one in 
the Lord Jesus. 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 

I know no differences of race, 

Of African and Saxon ; 
Of tawny skin, of rose-cheeked face, 

Of hair or crisp or flaxen. 
The soul within, that is the man, 

There is God's image hidden! 
And there He looks, each guest to scan, 

The bidden and unbidden. 

In Jesus Christ are all men one, 

And He their Elder Brother ; 
The races, various, 'neath the sun, 

Why should they vex each other ? 
Or Jew, or Greek, the blood the same 

Within their veins that's flowing; 
Or bond or free, to all He came, 

His dying love bestowing. 

The -same, the bread, His flesh we breaK. 

The wine, His blood, we're pouring ; 
We lose ourselves here for His sake, 

Repenting and adoring. 
There are no differences of grace, 

God's love to all descending ; 
The humblest is His dwelling place, 

His wing the least defending. 

What though my brother-man has worn 

The bondman's yoke and fetter, 
The scoff and jeer of pride has borne ; 

I am the more his debtor ! 
What man is weak and I'm not weak ? 

Offended, I'm not burning ? 
Is dumb and I refuse to speak ? 

Is spurned, take not the spurning ? 



THE RACE SOLVENT. 



One God in love, broods over all ! 

One prayer to Him is taught us ; 
One name for mercy when we call, 

One ransom Christ has brought us. 
One heart of meekness, lowly mind, 

Life's counter currents breasting ; 
One Father's house we hope to find, 

Within GocVs bosom resting. 



IV. 



LIFE ETERNAL. 

John xvii, 3 : " And this is life eternal, that they might know 
Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent," 

This is a definition of eternal life from the lips of the 
Lord Jesus Christ, and addressed to His Father and to our 
Father. Never were words spoken in circumstances more 
solemn, more tender. Before His awe-struck disciples 
He stands there, negotiating with the unseen Partner of 
the mysterious transaction, which is about to be con- 
summated. The hour is come. For this cause came He 
into the world, that He might impart life eternal to as 
many as would receive Him. But what is life eternal ? 
He answers this for the sake of His disciples, for our 
sakes, upon whom these ends of the worl come. 
"And this is life eternal, that they might k Thee, 
the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast 
sent.'' 

This is something different from immortality. The 
doctrine of immortality is that the soul will never cease 
to exist, that death does not end it, that death is only 
an invisible bridge over which it passes to a state be- 
yond. This is a doctrine of natural religion. The Bible 



6o 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



does not so much reveal it as take it for granted. The 
existence of God is a doctrine of natural religion. That 
there is a hereafter, and that every living being will have 
part in it; that there is a God and that every creature of 
His shall give account to Him ; of these things, we have 
witness within ourselves. We have an instinct which 
leads us to believe them. " We are better believers in 
immortality," says Emerson, " than we can give grounds, 
for;" and, says James Martineau, "we do not believe 
immortality, because we have proved it, but we forever 
try to prove it because we believe it." Bat what is. 
called life eternal is a different thing from immortality. 
Life eternal is something which is revealed as possible to 
those who are immortal. If the doctrine of immor- 
tality is assumed as the very basis of a revelation, is. 
taken for granted by God in communicating to man His 
will, the laws that should guide him, and the motives 
that should move him, the doctrine of life eternal is a 
doctrine of revealed religion. " Who abolished death 
and brought life and immortality to light in the Gospel ?'" 
In other words, let light in upon life and immortality, 

LIFE ETERNAL :; 

Let this be the subject of the morning's discourse. 

I. If there is such a thing as life eternal, it must be 
derived directly from God. God is the only being who 
has eternal life, either for Himself or any of His creatures. 
Temporal life we derive from temporal parentage. Eter- 
nal life we must derive from parentage eternal. " That 
which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



6l 



of the Spirit is spirit." There was a time when it was 
proclaimed by modern science that dead matter has the 
power to beget living things ; in other words, that life 
is spontaneously generated by death. But this is no 
longer proclaimed. The present doctrine of science is : 
" Life only from life." There is an impassable gulf be- 
tween the not-living and the living ; a gulf which can 
be bridged only by creative power, that is, God. 

"Marvel not that I said unto ye, ye must be born 
again." The birth spoken of here by the Saviour is 
into life eternal. We have had earthly parents. They 
have given us this pleasing, anxious being ; and they have 
passed away. We who have derived this being from them 
shall likewise pass away. The Saviour teaches us that 
our earthly entrance into life bears the burden of another 
entrance ; that as we are born of man so we need be born 
of God ! Temporal parentage gives us temporal life ; 
eternal parentage, life eternal. This doctrine is one of 
the hard doctrines of the Bible ; one of the distasteful 
ones. The children of Adam do not like to be told of 
a new stock better than theirs. The Bible teaches that 
until born again we are dead to God ; alienated from 
Him; dead to the spiritual world; alienated from it. 
The men who wish to get the supernatural out of religion 
have been bent upon doing what modern science has 
tried, and tried in vain. They have been trying to get 
life out of not-life ; life out of death ; regeneration out 
of culture. 

Recall some of the futile efforts of modern science to 



62 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



evolve life out of dead matter. Dr. Bastian, for exam- 
ple, after repeated experiments, announced that he had 
succeeded. But Professor Tyndall, more carefully re- 
peating similar experiments, found that Dr. Bastian had 
left germs of living things in the air within the flasks 
with which he experimented. And Mr. Dallinger proved 
that the lower forms of life are capable of surviving 
higher temperatures than Dr. Bastian had applied for 
their annihilation, so that both Professors Huxley and 
Tyndall fully admit that thus far there is "no experi- 
mental testimony to 'prove that life ever appears inde- 
pendent of antecedent life." This is the very law of 
Revelation respecting spiritual things. Christ appears 
here among men, a new type of man, coming to do the 
Father's will in His life and death ; withstanding the evil 
that is in the world. And when Nicodemus approaches 
Him by night, and proposes to adopt Him as a teacher 
come from God, proposes to submit himself as a pupil to 
His teachings, to make culture a substitute for regenera- 
tion, the Saviour thrusts into his face the doctrine that 
nrw life is what he wants. " Rabbi, we know Thou art 
a teacher come from God." This Nicodemus. Jesus 
answered and said unto Him : " Except a man be born 
of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom 
of God." Not that Jesus implied that he was not a 
teacher come from God, but that man wants something 
antecedent to teaching before he can be a fit pupil for 
such a teacher. His type of men cannot be repeated 
.here without the new birth. 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



63 



There is a way of receiving God through the senses ; 
through sights and sounds • as we see and hear manifesta- 
tions of His power and Godhead. You begin with your 
little child, and tell her that the thunder is the voice of 
God ; that He kindles the stars in the night ; that He 
touches the trees and they bud ; the grass and it blooms. 
There is a way of receiving God through the reason ; 
by thinking of Him, and inferring His existence, as a 
matter of philosophy, in order better to explain our 
theory of the universe. Unrenewed man is competent to 
either of these two processes. They do not involve alle- 
giance to God ! This is not the knowledge of God, 
which is the condition of life eternal. "That they 
might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, 
whom Thou hast sent." 

The knowledge of God in Jesus Christ, who came 
here to reveal Him, awakens man to a new life ; gives 
him new thoughts, new emotions, new motives, new 
aims. We talk about the dead languages ; meaning the 
languages of dead nations ; languages unspoken by living 
men and women. But there are scholars to whom no lan- 
guage is dead ; every language embalms the soul of those 
who once spoke it. How many words have come into 
the English through Greek or Latin embalmment ! But, 
languages are dead, also, because they no longer speak 
to the living. And here it is the living men who are 
dead, and not the languages. The Greek of Demos- 
thenes, was this ever dead to Rufus Choate? It is not 
the words of God that are dead ; it is the men to whom 



6 4 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



they are addressed. It is not the motives of the Bible 
that are dead ; it is the men to whom they are addressed. 
It is not the influences of the Spirit which are dead, but 
the men to whom they are addressed. I read to you in 
the Greek the passage: "Behold, I stand at the door, 
and knock ! ' ' but your ear is dead to it. The words are 
just as full of the life of God, and the yearning of God's 
love as though I read the English. The language of 
the Spirit is Greek to men unrenewed. The difference 
between people is, that some of them want to know God 
in creation ; and some in philosophy ; while the only 
true knowledge of Him is in Christ Jesus, who has come 
as a mediator between God and man ; as a propitiation 
for the sins of the whole world. And this knowledge is 
life eternal. 

There are men and women here this morning who 
have tried again and again to awaken in themselves this 
life eternal ; to get life out of death. They have yearned 
for God as a comforter in their troubles ; for a helper in 
their weaknesses ; for a counsellor in their ignorance. 
And they have tried to break through their materialism ; 
the wall of sense by which they are surrounded, by which 
they seemed walled in, and get at spiritual things, so 
that they may be real to them ; so that they may never 
return to their previous life. But, having no hold upon 
God by faith ; feeling none of the pulsations of a new 
life beating within their souls, they have soon become 
impatient at their failures and weaknesses and gone back 
to the old life of sense. The Saviour does not say, 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



65 



*' Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit," 
because there is anything arbitrary or artificial here. 
It is because "Life can come only from life!" He 
does not say it, because He wants to hinder men from 
coming into God's kingdom; but to show them how 'o 
get in. Teaching alone will not do it. It is helpful. 
But life is absolutely necessary. 

II. If there is such a thing as life eternal it must have a 
■suitable environment : that is, a suitable setting ; air to 
breathe ; circumstances where it can feed itself and pro- 
tect itself, and prolong itself, or be fed ; protected and 
prolonged by its author, 

" The new creature," spoken of in the Bible as the 
result of regeneration, is like all other creatures of God 
in this :: that in order to live, it must have adapted to it 
'Conditions appropriate to its life ; must have its habitat. 
In its birth, we have its nature ; in its environment, its 
circumstances, we have all the rest we need in order to 
determine what will come of it. If it have life, and 
an eternal environment suited to this life, it will live 
forever. The influence of climate upon animal and 
vegetable life, is one of the most interesting depart- 
ments of natural science. In his great work, the Kos- 
mos, Humboldt has classified the animal and vegetable 
life, so that we see how the law of unity runs through 
the whole system of creation. In the same latitudes ; 
in different latitudes, with the same temperature, we 
have the same or similar plants and trees; the same, or 
similar animals. This, notwithstanding the provision 



66 life: eternal. 

that God has made for the transportation of plant and 
tree germs on the wings of the wind ; notwithstanding the 
force of locomotion in animals. Only those organic 
structures, whether vegetable or animal, which get life 
and a start in a new habitat, only those to which the 
habitat is adapted, which are adapted to it, can long sur- 
vive. 

This new life of the soul, which is called in the Sav- 
iour's terminology, in the terminology of the Bible, life 
eternal must have its habitat, or it will not survive. It 
comes only from God ; it lives only in God, and in 
those who are surrounded by God as a renewing Spirit. 
It is a brave plant, the edelweiss, that blooms among 
the eternal snows of the Alps, that looks out in its 
fragile feebleness and beauty upon those unbroken soli- 
tudes of God, and is at home there. But it is just so 
with the edelweiss of the soul, the white flower of faith. 
It gets its nourishment out of God's highest fastnesses. 
It is a brave tree, the fir-tree, that goes climbing up the 
mountain peaks, like a scaling party up the ramparts, 
which are crowned with eternal silence and death. But 
that is its habitat. There it lifts up its Gothic spire, as 
though to> remind us that the earth itself is God's cathe- 
dral ; there it murmurs with the same deep voice that 
the ocean has ; breathing into God's ear its hymnal of 
praise. 

When we read, " Whom God loveth He chasteneth, 
and scourgeth every son He receiveth and again, "If ye 
endure chastening, God dealeth with you as sons;" we get 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



&7 



some suggestions as to the habitat of the soul in which 
this eternal life has been awakened. It is like the habi- 
tat of the edelweiss and the fir, in high up solitudes of faith. 
This sonship spoken of here is the sonship of God ; 
describes the new life of the soul in the likeness of God. 
The Being, bearing human form, who once walked 
among men, illustrating this life eternal, what was His 
habitat, His environment ? He was a man of sorrows, 
and acquainted with grief. But, only this, because it 
was the Father's will ! The Father's will was His habi- 
tat, His environment. Walking among us He breathed 
the air of eternity. He climbed the mountains, He 
penetrated solitudes, to get away from things of time 
and sense, and be with God. On the mount of trans 
figuration, the three favored disciples saw what com 
panionship He had ; what air He breathed ; how time 
and eternity met in Him, and in what He was doing. 

The Saviour says, "If a man abide not in Me, he 
is cast forth as a branch, and is withered." "With- 
out Me, out of connection with Me, ye can do noth- 
ing." The soul has its habitat, its environment, the 
soil in which it is rooted and grounded, in God ; in 
God manifest in the flesh ! If it have such a habitat, 
what can happen to it, that will be for its injur) ? 
"Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall 
tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or 
nakedness, or peril, or sword ? Nay, in all these things 
we are more than conquerors through Him that loved 
us. For I am persuaded that "neither death nor life, 



68 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things 
present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor 
any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the 
love of God, which is in Jesus Christ, our Lord." The 
fish has its habitat, the water, where it glides gracefully 
and lives joyously; where its proper food swims or 
floats around it. The bird has its habitat, the air, 
where it wings its pathway at will; where it mounts, 
where it descends, where it sails. The animal, man, 
has his habitat, the earth; creation's vast storehouse; 
where he is at liberty to eat what grows spontaneously, 
or what he can make grow ; to fabricate what he chooses 
to live in, and to wear. The water and the air are not 
his habitat ; but the solid earth. 

But, earth and earthly things are just as little the 
habitat of the soul of man of this life eternal, as the 
air and the water, of his body. His soul lives here, 
because of its relation to his body ; looks out as from 
the gratings of a prison-house. Three-score years and 
ten are allotted to him, for the life of his body; 
and then the connection between them is broken ; and 
he, who had heaven begun within him, mounts up to 
heaven, and to God. It is a fight with the surrounding 
conditions to make trees live in some of our territories. 
The Agricultural Department is querying whether trees, 
such as grow in some of the drier and colder regions of 
Russia, will not thrive in Dakota. It is a fight to main- 
tain the life of God in the soul of man ; to keep its 
•environment what God would have it. But, if this is 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



6 9 



<done, eternal life is just as sure as the present life ; be- 
cause this life having once begun in God, it can never 
end so long as the soul abides in God. 

The question with the man, who has never come into 
relations with things not seen, in such a sense, that 
there is a part of his nature, which just as really regards 
them its habitat, as the other part regards the earth as 
belonging to it ; the question with this man is this : 
'"Can my inner nature form such correspondences with 
what is unchangeable and eternal, that when what is 
changeable and temporal shall have passed away, those 
correspondences will continue ? " This is the very doc- 
trine of the test. "And this is life eternal, that 
they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus 
Christ, whom Thou hast sent." Modern science has 
given us this definition of a possible life eternal. It is 
in the words of Herbert Spencer : ' ' Perfect correspond- 
ence would be perfect life. Were there no changes in 
the environment, but such as the organism had adapted 
•changes to meet ; and were it never to fail in the effici- 
ency with which it met them, there would be an eternal 
• existence and eternal knowledge." If our souls have 
perfect correspondence with that which is in its very 
nature eternal, unchangeable, they must have perfect 
life in that environment. That this environment can 
never fail in the efficiency with which it surrounds us, 
and meets our wants, is as sure as that God is God, and 
He has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, His Son. 

There is no doubt that there are particulars in which 



7o 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



the soul changes its environment at death. It leaves the- 
body. It leaves all the surroundings, the scaffolding of 
circumstances, material, intellectual, spiritual, social, on 
which the great Master-Builder has been standing, as the 
structure of character has here gone up. The scaffold- 
ing of time and sense, of earthly parenthood, and 
human kin is all removed, and what has been 
erected remains alone to be inspected by the eye of Him 
who accepts or rejects what has been done here in the 
body. Is there an environment which, during the period 
of this life, we have made ready, in which to go forth as 
we go hence to be here no more ? Are there things that 
we love, that we feed upon with delight, that inspire us 
as thoughts and aspirations, things that relate to God. 
and the Kingdom of God among men ; things that are 
more endearing than the earth we tread, and all things 
upon it ; than the heavens which are arched above us, 
with their stars, that seem so imperishable, but which 
are to fall like the untimely leaves of the fig tree ? Are 
there things, such as character, and society, and taste, 
and purpose, which, when this earthly environment is 
broken up, will fit into, will fit us into that other envi- 
ronment which is the Kingdom of God? These are 
questions which do not relate to your religion or my 
religion ; which is the best ? But to the something 
deeper, whether we have any religion at all ; religion 
which will endure when we have no more of its earthly 
forms and props and helps. 

III. If there is such a thing as life eternal it cannot be 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



71 



maintained without availing itself of the helps of its 
suitable environment. There are some men who seem 
to think that they can moil here all their lives in the 
dirt, and then, at death, fly away a winged soul into all 
the delights of paradise ! The environment of the grub 
is the earth. It is on the earth and of it. And the 
grub, which becomes the butterfly, is no more unlike 
itself in its grubship when it comes forth from the tomb, 
where it has swung insensate, than the new man in Christ 
Jesus is like the old man in the image of Adam. 

The great function of environment is not to give life; 
that only can come from Him who has it to give; nor to 
modify life, though incidentally it does this ; but to sus- 
tain it. The text teaches us that eternal life is to know 
'God and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent. This defines 
it, but it also conditions it. It cannot be maintained 
without the fulfilment of this condition. There is no 
continued life without environment fitted to the mainte- 
nance of this life. Take the sea-gull, that brave pirate 
vof the wing, that glories in the tempest, and pounces 
upon its prey in the water with a sound like th 
take the sea-gull and confine him where he can 
only grain diet, and how soon will he pine away and die. 
The life of the new-born soul is like God's life, eternal. 
But life is only a part of being, when you come to the 
question of its continuance. Even life eternal is condi- 
tioned on environment, on the soul having its habitat in 
God. "Abide in me and I in you !" 

The tree, the insect, the bird, the animal finds what 



7^ 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



it needs, and thus lives. It is because it does not de- 
pend upon its life but uses this life to maintain life. 
One of the pitiful stories which come to us from the 
Indian country is, that having legislated and betrayed 
the wild man out of the lands of his fathers, having, 
taken him from his native environment, we, who do not 
know what to do with our income, let him die of starva- 
tion. Once the waters teemed with fish for him, the 
woods with venison, the air with fowls. That is the 
way the God of nature provided for him . But now our 
national Congress votes him his blanket and his rations, 
and while he is waiting for it to dispose of more im- 
portant matters and get to him he dies of starvation. 
One great abuse of the doctrine of election is right here : 
Men say they have this eternal life and then are careless 
about their environment, out of which its maintenance 
must spring. Read some of the Psalms. For example, 
such passages as these : " He that dwelleth in the secret 
place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow 
of the Almighty; " ' ' Thou art my hiding place; " H Keep 
me as the apple of thine eye, hide me under the shadow 
of thy wing ;" He shall cover thee with His feathers,, 
and under His wing shall thou trust ; " " Because thou, 
hast made the Lord, even the Most High, thy habitation 
there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague 
come nigh thy dwelling ; " " Thou shalt be in league with 
the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field shalL 
be at peace with thee." 

just what the habitat of the creatures of God are to- 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



73; 



them ; their birth-place, their dwelling-place, their hid- 
ing-place ; the place that gives them food and drink 
just that God is to the life of the believer. The Creator 
makes no mistake with regard to the habitat of His crea- 
tures, the lower animals. When the land-bird wanders 
off to sea, and with tired and drooping wing strikes at 
last against the ship's mast, and falls dead to the deck, 
that is no mistake of the Creator. The dove which the 
patriarch took back into the window of the ark. sought for 
her habitat in vain. The waters had not receded from it.. 
But, when a few days later, she came not back again, she 
had sought and found her habitat. The Creator has made 
no mistakes with regard to this eternal life. There is 
only one way of maintaining it. It is by abiding in God. 
and having God's words abide in us. 

The text speaks of knowing God as eternal life. In 
another passage we are exhorted to acquaint ourselves 
with God and be at peace. This knowledge of God, this 
acquaintance with Him, is one of the technical things of 
the Bible. It is not ordinary knowledge ; it is experi- 
mental. It is not a speaking acquaintance ; it is an in- 
timate, familiar, endearing one! Just as the little child 
knows its tender and patient mother through her minis- 
trations in the nursery and the home ; just as the grateful 
pupil knows the teacher through his wise instructions and. 
counsels; just as the friend knows the friend through his 
fidelity in the days that try men's souls ; so the soul 
needs to be acquainted with God. Not by the hearing 
of the ear merely ; not through the written word and the 



74 



LIKE ETERNAL. 



church ordinance merely ; for these do not bring life 
eternal ! But, when no other eye pities ; when no other 
ear hears; then to go alone to God, as our unfailing 
friend, to cast ourselves in our helplessness and loneli- 
ness upon His care, and feel that He bears us up in His 
hands; that He regards us in eternal league and cove- 
nant with Him ; that He puts beneath us the everlasting 
arms ; and that no man is able to pluck us out of 
His hands ; that there is no force in the universe, no 
foe in the universe to which He has not said : " Touch 
not mine anointed ; those that have made a covenant 
with Me by sacrifice ; 1 ' this is life eternal ; a life that 
is imbedded in the very being and attributes of God ! 
Is He omniscient ? It is for our sakes. Is He omni- 
present ? It is to uphold and protect us. Is He om- 
nipotent ? We need that omnipotence. With all God's 
infinite yearnings of love going out after us ; with all 
His attributes engaged for us, we go off into the dread 
unknown, and to us it is no longer unknown. Know- 
ing God, we are at home in God. No change of being 
can float us away from Him ; can separate us from His 
life ; that life which is hid with Christ in Him. Be- 
cause He lives, we live also ; our life fed from the eter- 
mal fountains of His life ; forever and forever. 

What hast thou done, my soul, to meet 

The destiny impending, 
When death's dark vale before thy feet, 

Thou -art to it descending ? 



LIFE ETERNAL. 



What hast thou done for that dread hour, 
When heart and flesh shall fail thee ? 

When burdened with life's deathless dower, 
Those untried scenes assail thee ? 

Where wilt thou wing thy troubled flight, 

For some safe refuge yearning ? 
Some shelter from the storm and night, 

To which thou canst be turning ? 

Where wilt thou go ? Where wilt thou dwell t 

Beneath whose shadow hiding ? 
My soul, in time look to it well, 

Thyself to Christ confiding. 

No change of worlds can change His love„ 

Nor from that love can sever ; 
In heights, in depths, beneath, above,, 

Thou livest in Him forever ! 



V. 



THE SENSE OF PBOPEBTY IN SIN. 

Job xiii, 26. " For thou writest bitter things against me, and 
makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth." 

Nothing is more likely to obliterate the sense of sin 
than the passage of time and the change of standards. 
It is a very difficult thing for us to realize that our moral 
lives have an identity like that of our natural ones. The 
body keeps the scars which were made upon it by the in- 
discretions of childhood and youth. You look at that 
right hand of yours. There is where that jackknife 
slipped as you were shaping a wooden sword, or a wooden 
spear, or carving out a mimic ship to sail in your moth- 
er's wash-tub. You will wear that scar to your grave. 
It is one of the strange things about this constant flux 
of the particles of matter in our physical structure, 
which is just as ceaseless as are the tides of the ocean, 
that it never disturbs the handwriting of our earlier days; 
it never disturbs the marks of accident to our various 
members. The law of identity is a law that, through all 
this flux of matter, aye, by all this flux of matter, our 



7 8 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 



bodies shall be the same, when we pillow our heads in 
earth, that they were when first pillowed on a mother's 
bosom. 

It is so of our moral nature. There are multitudes 
of things which you and I have done, or just escaped 
doing in our youth, sometimes had it in our hearts to 
do, which our maturer life severely condemns. We are 
ashamed of them ; they do not seem like us. We look 
back to such a period where two paths diverged, one 
leading to wretchedness and ruin, and the other to peace 
and to God ; and we believe that by God's grace we left 
the first, where we had been securely walking, and took 
the last. And it now seems strange to us that we ever 
walked there. Our standards of what is right and wise, 
of what is true and pure, have so changed. It is difficult 
to think of Martin Luther, for example, as punished by 
his parents in his boyhood for stealing cherries and nuts, 
and the thousand petty offenses which little hands are 
tempted to commit; the same Martin Luther whose great 
name the world now honors. It is difficult for you and 
me to review our past lives, especially during the period 
of our youthful indiscretions, errors and sins, and real- 
ize that we are the same as when we wandered in those 
devious paths. But just as amid the flux of matter, from 
childhood to manhood, we have the same bodies ; so, 
notwithstanding these great moral revolutions which 
come through the power of truth, we have the same 
moral identity; as the outer man is the same, so is the 
inner man. 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 



79 



The text reads : " Thou writest bitter things against 
me, and make me to possess the iniquities of my 
youth.'' And the subject which I shall discuss is 

THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 

I. In the abstract, every man hates sin, and does not 
like to be held guilty of it ; to be regarded having prop- 
erty in it. This proves that his nature comes from God. 
No man can say anything in favor of the dignity of 
man's nature, as God made it, and even as in his best 
moments, every man would himself have it, from which 
I shall dissent. So far as I know, this is true of all 
orthodox Christians. The main point of difference be- 
tween ourselves and those who call themselves liberal 
Christians is whether in man's present condition he has 
the power of self-recovery ; whether the not-life of his 
spiritual nature can, without God, produce life. We say 
the Bible teaches and experience teaches that it cannot. 
The Apostle Paul puts it just as we find it : "I delight 
in the law of God, after the inward man ; but I see 
another law in my members, warring against the law of 
my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of 
sin, which is in my members." You cannot say any- 
thing in praise of goodness in the abstract, which men 
will not approve. This is one of the troubles with those 
who preach liberal doctrines, so-called. They fall into 
this agreeable way of dealing with the evil which is in 
the world ; presenting aspects of truth to which men 
universally give assent, and giving them credit, for being 



80 THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 

as good as their own ideal standards; dwelling upon that 
in man, which delights in the law of God, and not upon 
that other law in our members ; which wars against it, 
and which needs to be broken up. 

Now, no man is always, or even usually as good as his 
own ideal standard. The text reads: " Thou writest 
bitter things against me. ' ' Men write bitter things against 
themselves. Take the thoughts of men, as they lie 
awake in the night-watches, when they are sick, or when 
some great trouble makes them wakeful ; they have not 
an enemy in the world who is so severe on them as they 
are sometimes on themselves. In the Psalmist's phrase: 
" They break all their own bones ! " We have a proverb 
that listeners seldom hear any good of themselves. Let 
a man listen to the voice of his own conscience as he 
lies there, all the rest of the world asleep ; isolated to 
himself; and thinks over his weaknesses, and blunders 
and sins. He hears no good of himself. These things 
would not be especially bitter unless they were true. 
False accusations he can endure ; the testimony of 
people who do not care for the truth ; to whom a false- 
hood that is plausible comes as a godsend ; whose tongue 
has under it the poison of asps. But, as he lies there 
alone, he possesses his iniquities only to condemn them ; 
and despise himself so for them. 

Look at this fact ; that we condemn things in others 
which in ourselves we allow ; just the opposite to what 
it ought to be. A man ought to love his own purity 
and honesty and honor better than that of anybody else. 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 8 1 

A man's conscience was intended to be his own friend, 
and not another man's enemy. If he is seeking to be 
perfect, to be like Jesus of Nazareth, it will be so. In 
the Sermon on the Mount, the Great Teacher said : 
" And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy 
brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in 
thine own eye? " The conscience is the organ of moral 
vision. It is the man, with a beam in his own eye, who 
is most active in looking after the mote in his brother's 
eye ; his beam makes him so uncomfortable, and he 
would fain persuade himself that it is his brother's mote. 
The most self-indulgent men are the severest in their 
judgment of other men. The man who wants the most 
rigidly to press home the dictate of his conscience upon 
you ; to prescribe the rule of life which you ought to 
adopt ; get at his manner of living, as between himself 
and his conscience, and in nine cases in ten you will 
ifind that it is self-indulgent ; he is exercising the strength 
of his moral nature on the lives of other people. I was 
dining with a man in another city who, as was his usual 
custom, had his wines on the table ; and, without being 
Tallied on the subject, he entered at once upon the de- 
fense of the practice ; and one of his arguments was that 
none of the professed teetotalers were absolutely so; did 
not sometimes indulge in the use of stimulants. I told 
him that was not the result of my observation of them ; 
though perhaps there were notable instances where it 
was true. But, doubtless, the principle of his remark, 
lie found right iiexe.: When men press home too rigidly, 



» 



82 THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 

their ideas of what other men ought to do, they are 
tempted to be lax in their own practices ; and, perhaps, 
in the very direction of his rigidity. The principle is 
a sound one. 

This is true, that while men do not see themselves as 
others see them, they likewise do not see themselves as 
they see others. They do not apply that moral stand- 
ard, which God has given them, so that they can walk 
uprightly, and, therefore,- securely, to themselves, as they 
apply it to other men. If you and I were as good Chris- 
tians as other people ; would they accept our standards 
for them ; would be sure to become, we should be very 
different from what we are ; we should pray more, we 
should study the Bible more, we should sin less. All 
this shows us that we have a law in our minds which is 
hostile to evil ; that whatever our practice, our ideal is 
right ; accords with that of the Bible, and of God Him- 
self. Therefore, it is that we do not like to confess that 
any sin is our own ; that we have property in it, and that 
when a sin is brought home to our door we do just as 
Adam did, when he said to God's inquiry after his con- 
duct in reference to the forbidden fruit : " The woman 
whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the 
tree, and I did it eat ;" and as Eve did, " The serpent 
beguiled me and I did eat." We try to transfer it as 
property to another. 

II. Property in sin cannot be shifted, like other prop- 
erty, from man to man. 

In law, that is, in law's theory, there is nothing 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 



83 



more sacred than the right of property, and yet there is 
nothing that is more easily passed from hand to hand. 
What is yours to-day is another man's to-morrow. This 
transfer of property from one man to another, this in- 
terchange of our property in money for a commodity, 
or something which is convenient or comfortable for us,, 
is the very foundation of all trade, national or interna- 
tional. The railroads, the ships of the ocean are only 
bearing back and forth the property which is changing 
hands. The pulsations of national and international 
life are transmitted along the channels of trade : rivers, 
canals, railroads, the oceans. And yet, in a stricter sense, 
there is almost nothing we can call our own. As having 
a life-tenure upon this planet, we call ours, what we can 
control the use of while we live : the houses we put up, 
the land we purchase and fence in, the books we write 
and publish. But the Bible teaches us that we can carry 
nothing away with us. These city improvements, which 
occupy so much of our time, the lots we purchase and 
grade, the buildings we plan and erect ; yes, they are 
ours, in a sense. That is, we have paid money for them, 
we have deeds of them, but who will hold the deeds to-mor- 
row? who can tell ? Somebody ; God only knows who. 

The only thing we have to hold and carry away with 
us is character ; is what we are in the hidden man of the 
heart ; so what we have is not ours, only what we are. 
When an evil deed is committed m a city the first ques- 
tion is: "Whose property is that deed?" The man 
who did it owns it. It belongs to no one else in all the 



84 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 



universe. A id the great effort of the author of that 
deed and of those who try to defend him, is to show 
that he had no property in it ; that he was not there in 
person to di it ; that if he did it, he did it without mali- 
cious intent. It is true that he is not the oily one who 
has personal interest in what he has done. It often hap- 
pens that the wrong-d^er is almost the last one to realize 
the nature and magnitude of his crime ; that he b^ars 
lightly what falls with crushing weight upon his parents, 
his family ; that he is so bent upon escaping the penalty 
of it, that he regards the effort of civil authority to ar- 
rest aid panish him ai extraordinary warfare upon his 
person. 

A man gets property in sin, just as he gets it anything 
else: by making an outlay of himself to secure or ac- 
complish it. Evil cannot be bought and sold for money. 
The only way a man can ever get property in sin, is by 
selling himself. It is true that in the last analysis a man's 
honestly earned money ; that which he has got by the 
sweat of his brow, is himself. This is why it is called 
his, because he has pat so much of himself into it. So 
that the evil which he gives his money to accomplish, 
even though accomplished by the hand of another, is so 
far forth his property. Neither can a man get rid of his 
property in sin by paying money. In these days, in 
some of our cities, at least, it is supposed to be within the 
limits of possibility to buy out the law. Corrupt men 
know how to manipulate juries, so that the ends of hu- 
man justice are defeated, and the guilty gj free. The 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 85 

Tecent uprising in a city of the interior, was intended to 
be a protest against this method of relieving men whose 
hands were blood-red with murder from their property 
in evil. Thirty or forty lives were sacrificed, and a great 
city was thrown into a riot, because the people believed 
the law to be so administered that men who had prop- 
erty in sin were relieved of it. 

As between man and man there is no equivalent, there 
is no consideration, on account of which property in 
sin can be transferred. He who commits sin enters into 
a transaction which is not strictly and primarily between 
man and man ; between himself and another man. It is 
between himself and God. Can a man who, by putting 
.an obstruction on a railroad track, hurls a number ol 
his fellow-beings to instant death, cripples and defaces 
for life a number more ; interrupts traffic and travel for 
Ihours ; can this man settle up with the railroad company 
or with the survivors or the relatives of the dead? It is 
true that a man can often do something to mitigate the 
sufferings of others from his wrong-doing. But this does 
not relieve him of his property in this act. It is true 
that wrong-doing often enters into God's plan as a 
source of benefit to those not injured by it ; neither 
does this relieve him of such property. 

You remember in Dickens' " Our Mutual Friend," 
how Bradley Headstone, who though he had taken the 
life of another man, tried to shift his property in the 
deed upon Roger Riderhood, by copying his clothes, 
and his neckties ; by shaking blood upon him as he lay 



86 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 



asleep ; and yet, when he went back to his school, how 
his deed haunted him ; deprived him of his sleep ; made 
him cower before the innocent faces of his pupils ; and 
when Roger Riderhood appeared in his school, with the 
bundle of clothes in which the foul deed had been done, 
how he trembled before him. And you remember how r 
the next day, being Saturday and a holiday, though 
Bradley Headstone was to have no more holidays, how 
in order to be rid of this man Riderhood, who threat- 
ened to live with him, to eat and sleep with him, till he 
had given him the last penny he earned ; Bradley Head- 
stone, with this shadow of his evil deed beside him, walked 
on the banks of the canal ; you remember the death-grap- 
ple between them, and how they both went into the 
watery depths, and their bodies were found there under 
the ooze and scum, still in that last struggle. The prop- 
erty in sin had not been shifted ; it had been taken by 
the owner elsewhere ! 

The sense of property in sin, because we have in- 
vested our wills in it, that it is a man's own possession '„ 
being followed by it as by a shadow ; being haunted by 
it as by the presence of something we loathe ; condemn- 
ing ourselves for it ; for the folly of it, the ignominy of 
it, the madness of it ; the consciousness that our own 
estimate of it is just what would be the estimate of every 
living being in the universe, could he be made ac- 
quainted with it ; the feeling that God knows it and 
condemns it \ that He keeps His omniscient eye on it,, 
day and night, as our property, saying to us, through our 



THE SENSE OF FROPERTY IN SIN. 87 

conscience, and by His speech : " Thou art the man ! "' 
and that at length, when men are judged for deeds 
done here in the body, we must stand before His bar and 
give account of it ; this must make existence a burden 
to a sinner wherever he may be ! 

Take this experience of Job ; what was the occasion 
of it ? It was simply God's letting him come into pos- 
session of his own, making him heir to his own youth F 
Job does not complain of it as unjust. God had been 
dealing with him so that all his past, and especially the 
past of his youth, when his blood was hot, when his will 
was strong, and when his judgment was imperfect and he 
did not know it, came back as his own. God showed* 
him his title-deed to those iniquities. The great plea, 
which men urge, when told of a judgment-day and the 
penalties of another life, is that all they want is to be 
treated according to their deserts. This is precisely 
what awaits us all : judgment according to the deeds of 
the body; judgment according as every man's work, 
shall be. And this is precisely where Job felt the press- 
ure of God's hands. " Thou writesfc bitter things against 
me, and makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth. ' ' 
There is no danger that the Judge of all the earth will 
be confused as to a man's identity ; as to his where- 
abouts ; as to his agency in sin ; as to his property in it. 
Peter never will be accused of betraying Christ, nor 
John of denying Him with an oath. But every man 
will possess his own sin, and not another man's. 

If these positions are correct, namely, first, that every- 



■88 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 



man instinctively hates sin as property belonging to him- 
self, and does not like to be charged with it as his prop- 
erty, to be held guilty of it and accountable for its con- 
sequences ; and if again property in sin cannot be shifted 
from man to man, cannot be converted into freedom 
from sin ; what is the condition in which we who have 
been sinning all our lives long ;* who have to answer for 
sins of childhood and sins of youth ■ sins of manhood 
■and womanhood ; sins of middle life and sins of old age ; 
wat is the condition in which we find ourselves ? This 
question prepares us for some of the strong expressions 
of Revelation respecting what God in Jesus Christ has 
■done to transfer sin, to take away sin. And I remark : 

III. God has provided a way by which sin as our per- 
sonal property, sin as our possession, can be disposed of. 
This is the great fact of the Bible. The great fact out 
of the Bible is sin : sin as man's work, sin as man's 
memory, sin as man's degradation, sin as the source of 
man's apprehension. The great fact in the Bible is 
'God's method by which a man can put away sin ; his 
own sin ; so that it shall never more be his possession, so 
that he shall lose the very sense of property in it. 

There can ba no way of putting away a man's 
sins; of transferring them, of getting rid of them, 
without God is a party to it. God has purposely made 
us so, that, in our best moods, we think about sin, 
just as He does ; in our secret souls we think so about 
our own sins. And, what we term conviction of sin 
is God's Spirit letting His light in upon our sins, 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 



8 9 . 



emphasizing them in such a way that we see that 
they are still written against us; that though not 
recalled by us for years, they are there; and though 
memory has not brought them back as ours, they still 
are ours. This is a world full of sinful people. The 
majority, probably the large majority of people in any 
city, or community at any one time, would, in candor, 
acknowledge that they are not living according to the 
dictates of their own consciences ; that they are allow- 
ing in themselves things which they condemn in others; 
things which belittle them in their own eyes ; and which, 
if disclosed, would belittle them in the eyes of other- 
men, who are sinful like themselves. And yet God has 
so set men together in family, civil and social relations ;■; 
so bound them together by ties of intercommunication, 
and interdependence, that a man can seldom commit 
flagrant sins in his youth without their following him 
all his days. 

In September, 1850, while Mr. Webster was still Sec- 
retary of State, he gave a dinner to the alumni of Dart- 
mouth College, of whom he himself was one ; primus 
inter pares. During the dinner, some one said to Mr. 
Webster, of his argument in the Girard Will case : ' 'That 
was the greatest effort in your life ! ' ' Mr. Webster play- 
fully said, he believed that remark had been made of all 
his efforts ; and so he proposed, in his familiar way, to 
pass the question round to the guests present, as to which 
one was really entitled to be called his greatest effort,. 
Among those m.eutioried.by the guests were, ' ' The Eulogy 



go 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 



on Adams and Jefferson," "The Reply to Hayne," 
" The Address at Bunker's Hill," "The Eulogy of the 
Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock," "The Greek Revolution," 
and "The Panama Mission." The question then came 
back to Mr. Webster himself. He replied, by subordi- 
nating all his other great efforts to his plea before the 
Supreme Court for his Alma Mater. " How came I to 
be retained in the Girard Will case ? How came I to 
be sent to Congress from Massachusetts so soon after 
removing there ? How came I to have laid before me 
the occasion of the efforts you have honored by your 
encomiums? How came I to be so highly appreciated 
in Great Britain? It was all, primarily, owing to the 
reputation, which, when feeling that my Alma Mater was 
being deeply wronged, I won in my effort to defend her. ' ' 
That act was Mr. Webster's personal property, as all 
our noble acts are ; as all our sinful acts are. It brought 
him no large fee. In it he stood against his native State, 
and against her Supreme; Court. He was then in his 
thirty-seventh year. When he was sixty-nine he delib- 
erately gave it as his opinion that that act done in his 
thirty-seventh year, did more to determine and con- 
trol his professional and public career than any other 
act of his life. No man ever knows what act of his will 
most determine his moral destiny. It is coming in some- 
where. Oftentimes it is one of those acts of which the 
patriarch speaks : a deed of our youth ! That deed is 
like one of many crowns afterwards to be won ; it is 
like a millstone hung around his neck. If he would for- 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 91 

get it, the world will not let him ; if he would outlive 
it, some gray-haired veteran still lingers somewhere on 
earth to tell the tale. This illustrates just how in nature, 
as we say ; under His providential economy, God has 
fixed it so that a man shall possess his own deeds, good 
or evil. 

2. There can be no method of putting away a man's 
•sins without he himself is party to it and pacified by it. 
In this respect sin is like all other property. It 
cannot be parted from us but by our consent. And 
here is where I would put emphasis upon man's 
dignity. " In the image of God made He them !" It 
is man's glory to be made like God, in that which is 
God's highest glory : namely, in his moral nature. It is 
not God's highest glory that He made the heavens and 
the earth, that by Him all things consist. It is not 
man's highest glory that he cultivates the earth and sub- 
dues it ; that he clothes it with harvests and flocks ; that 
he gives his merchandise the wings of steam ; and flashes 
his words along the pathways of the lightning. Man's 
highest glory is that he may be one with God, by be- 
coming like Him. What God approves in man, that 
only in his inmost soul he must approve in himself. He 
does not approve in himself the unrest of his nature ; 
the spiritual ennui and discontent which often cloud his 
horizon ; nor of the sin out of which these spring. The 
language of his spirit is, and it goes up in secret places 
to the ear of God : " Oh ! wretched man that I am, who 
shall deliver me from the body of this death ?' ' 



9 2 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 



You say it is an easy matter for God to forgive sin. 
He has only to exercise the infinite grace of His nature 
and the deed is done. But forgiveness is like any other 
gift. It requires the participation of two persons. It 
requires one to forgive and the other to be forgiven. It 
requires one to give the gift of grace and another to 
take it. This property, which you and I have in sin, 
has to be transferred, or it will remain ours forever. "On 
Him was laid the iniquity of us all 1" Do we say so ? 
The property, which God has in grace, has to be trans- 
ferred or it is His forever. " I am He that blotteth out 
thy transgressions for My own sake." Forgiveness is 
with God; but the consent to forgiveness, the agreement 
to be reconciled to God as one, who has forgiven for 
His own sake ; that is with man, that is with you and 
me. 

You have seen a little child, whose mother has crossed 
his will, has denied him something, reproved him for 
something wrong, hang aloof from her kisses, turn his 
face away from her smiles, refuse to be reconciled on the 
basis of this limitation. This very nature is in you and 
me with reference to God's forgiveness. It is not irrev- 
erent to say that there is no forgiveness in God ; I 
mean the depths of His love have no resources of for- 
giveness ; His infinite grace has no expedients of for- 
giveness that can reach one who does not yearn to be 
forgiven. This is where men make the great mistake of 
life with regard to this subject. It seems to them that 
if God has such tenderness and patience ; that if He is 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 



93 



not willing that any should perish, but that all should 
come to repentance ; why the obligation under which 
they put Him whenever they conclude to give over trans- 
gression is so great, that they have nothing to fear. They 
have this to fear : That they may be so confirmed in a 
disposition to live in a world that God has made ; to 
breathe the air which He has so wondrously adapted to 
their lungs ; to become familiar with His ten thousand 
voices of warning, persuasion, entreaty, while they allow 
them to pass by as the idle wind, and yet not be for- 
given ; that it will abide with them forever ! So far as 
the Bible goes we know of nothing more that God pro- 
poses to do. So far as our conjecture or imagination 
can go we know nothing more that God can do. Now, 
what do you and I propose to do ? 

3. There can be no method of putting away a man's 
sins without God and man are both party to it. Prop- 
erty has to be transferred b) people who consent to- 
gether to the transfer. It is so of this property. It is 
-a transaction which requires not only the action of two 
separate individualities, but their concurrent action ! 
Such action is possible ; such action is provided for by 
God Himself with reference to sin. I have tried in this 
discourse to make emphatic the sense of property in sin, 
the truth that it is not something of a general nature ; 
like the air or the light which we breathe ; in which we 
see ; and thus make them ours, but something which be- 
longs to each man and to no one else, because he creates 
it ; his personality goes into it. I think this truth com- 



94 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 



mends itself to every man's conscience in the sight of" 
God. The Bible calls us sinners because we make sin, 
just as a man is called a hatter because he makes hats. 
Now, with this impression fresh in memory, I want to 
cite to you some of the representations of the Bible. 
For example, take the words of John the Baptist to his 
disciples : " Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away 
the sins of the world." To the Hebrew mind that im- 
plied a transfer; a victim at the altar of sacrifice surren- 
dering His life as a propitiation for sin ; standing in the 
place of the sinner as a sinner, that the sinner might be 
released. Take again the words of the Apostle Paul in 
the 2d Epistle to the Corinthians: "For God hath 
made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we 
might be made the righteousness of God in Him. ' ' Here 
is a method by which the sinner's property in sin may- 
be transferred to One who has no property in sin ; in 
which, at the same time, God's property in righteous- 
ness may be transferred to one who has no righteousness. 
You say you do not understand it. I do not ask you to 
understand it. God does not ask you to understand it. 
You who are not learned in the law will stand in the: 
presence of your advocate, your counselor, and set your 
seal to a document you never wrote, couched in lan- 
guage the very phraseology of which is obsolete ; lan- 
guage the meaning of which is cumbered by hundreds 
of legal glosses and interpretations ; and because your 
legal adviser says, write your name there, you do it 
without a misgiving. I bring you this document of your; 



THE SENSE OF PROPEREY IN SIN. 



95 



Father's love, written by His hand and sealed with His 
name in the blood of His Son ; and I assure you that if 
you will put your soul's. signature there, your property in 
sin shall be transferred to that Mighty One on whom God 
has laid your help ; and His property in righteousness 
shall be transferred to you, so that it shall seem to your 
soul as though His own lips repeated the words : " De- 
part in peace, thy sins are forgiven thee !" And what 
is your answer ? Will you be justified by faith and have 
peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ ? Will 
you let the love of God break down the wall of partition 
between Him and yourself ? Will you accept what God 
proposes ? Will you take His Son Jesus Christ, the Lord, 
as your mediator between Himself and yourself? Will 
you pass your property in sin over upon Him who knew 
no sin, that He may take it away? 

Lo the Lamb of God, my soul ! 

Patient here thy nature wearing, 
Wounded sore, to make thee whole, 
All life's burdens with thee sharing; 
Numbered with transgressors He, 
Bearing thine iniquity ! 

By one man came death through sin ; 

Vain our sorrow and contrition ; 
By One Man comes peace within ; 
By One Man comes full remission. 
Bruised reed, He will not break^ 
He forgives for His own sake ! 



THE SENSE OF PROPERTY IN SIN. 

Tempted like as thou art here, 

Formed, O wonder ! in thy fashion, 
Sharing human joy and tear, 

Full of grace and sweet compassion ; 
Lo the Lamb of God, to-day ! 
He will take thy sin away ! 

Reach thy finger ! Lo his hands ! 

To the cross for thee they nailed Him, 
Stood around in mocking bands, 

With their taunts and jeers assailed Him. 
Left of God in agony, 
Ah ! my soul, it was for thee. 

Reach thy hand ! behold His side ! 

Be not faithless, but believing, 
In that cleft for sinners hide, 

Cleansing, healing, there receiving. 
Lo ! my soul, the|Lamb of God ! 
He for thee death's pathway trod. 



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